


Bunk in the Red Part Three

by dollarpound



Category: Community (TV), Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:49:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23621107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollarpound/pseuds/dollarpound
Summary: It was the day of the end of the Dwarf, but Ace had other fish to fry...





	Bunk in the Red Part Three

**Author's Note:**

> Written two years ago, some bits have aged badly

‘Hey, I just thought...’ said Jeff.

‘You did?!’ said Cat, craning his neck as if there was something to see. Craning his neck from the bottom bunk, of the prison cell, in the spaceship.

‘If Lister’s cellmates with Rimmer...’

‘He is – you’re right! Let me know if you have any more thoughts.’ He decraned, settling back in...

‘Wait! I’m not finished, this is a long thought, with different sections you have to hold together to get. You think you can do that Cat?’

‘I was with you up to “wait!”,’ said Cat.

‘Okay, I’ll use these...’ Jeff jumped down from the top bunk and began arranging the minibottles of ungents and products on the table. ‘If Rimmer’s with Lister...’ He shunted the two aerosol cans together. ‘And Kochanski’s with Kryten.’ He shuffled moisturizers like he was explaining a chess move. ‘And Troy’s with Ahbed, and Shirley’s with Annie and I’m with you.... where’s Britta?’

‘You dummy,’ said Cat, who’d got up, and was spying the arrangement carefully, hands on hips. Jeff shrugged innocently. Cat went over to the sink and coming back slammed a small tub of grease down on the table. ‘Britta’s with your pecshine 4000! It’s the only container left!’

He lifted the tub and it felt light. ‘This isn’t the first deduction you’ve made of my PecShine 4000 is it Cat?’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Show me your pecs.’ Cat pulled down the mauve boiler suit he so hated to reveal the pert perfection of the first set of pectoral muscles.

‘See, they’re all shiny! Look at mine, they’re practically mat!’

‘They are some nice titties though, Jeff, you take good care of yourself.’

‘Thanks! How do you keep yourself looking so ripped?’

‘Oh you know: prowling, stretching, that kind of thing...’

‘Chin-ups?’

‘Bless you,’ said Cat.

<~k

On the morning of the end of the Dwarf, Lister and Rimmer, a gay couple stranded at least 3 million years into Deep Space on a nanobotically reconstructed mining ship, sat and talked cordially, and hungoveredly with Camille and Hector, the recently reunited gay pleasure GELF couple. Cordially, despite Hector violently assaulting Rimmer the night before last. (Rimmer not reporting the assault to Hollister, much to the chagrin of Lister). Hungoverdly because of a party called to honour their friend Ace, who had rescued a baby BEGG from the murderous sites of the Canaries, a yellow PVC clad convict army, and freed the cult political prisoner Birdman along with the much maligned Todhunter, who had become the Rimmer of the ship. The ship smeghead. 

Todhunter found himself, on the morning of the end of the world, having been beaten to a pulp by a notorious corridor gang called Frankenstein’s Monsters, questionably medicated and accidently dumped into a conduit of Red Dwarf’s refuse system, staring into the eyes of a lifeform specifically genetically generated to be able to eat through anything, and with a known predilection for humans who went to English boarding schools.

‘So what happened to Todhunter?’ asked Hector.

‘Todhunter got so jealous of Ace, he tried to take the credit for Ace’s actions at precisely the wrong moment. Nobody got that Ace was actually saving me, least of all me. It’s only when we looked at the CCTV you can see the Kinitawowi Chief was going to attack me with a corrosive microorganism that could have spread and melted the whole ship. I think it’s like in Quantum Leap, did you ever see that show?’ The blobs kind of scrunched in a nod, they loved TV. ‘It’s like he’d fulfilled his mission or whatever and just beamed out to the next thing. He saved the ship! What a guy...’ he said dreamily.

‘What about the Wildfire? Doesn’t he need that to dimension jump?’

On the morning of the end of the Dwarf, Ace’s light bee suddenly appeared, suspended in the middle of Landing Bay 42. This was because Ace had buzzed out of the invisible dimension jumping ship the Wildfire and now let himself drop before hitting the retros and fluttering the police tape marking the periphery of the Wildfire’s mysterious and inconvenient location.

‘Any idea what happened to Julie Burchill?’ said Lister to Camille, referring to her ex.

‘She’s obsessed with cats...’

‘She’s not the only one,’ said Lister, thinking of Frankenstein’s Monsters, who believed what they called the Deep Dwarf was hiding a cat.

On the morning of the end of the Dwarf, Cat and Kochanski, in matching silk pyjamas, cuddled and kissed in their four poster bed in the ambassador’s suite of the Mimas Embassy. There was a knock on the door. It was Kukton, their submissive transmech submissive transmech, with waffles and coffee. Kukton couldn’t stop making waffles since they’d got back to the Dwarf. 

‘Morning,’ said Kochanski.

‘Thanks, Kuks,’ said Cat.

‘My goodness, that’s a big one,’ said Kukton, watching the ships coming in over Red Dwarf City, and one in particular. A big one.

‘Good,’ said Kochanski. ‘Holly’s best guess is we hit the Singularity a week ago, before we lost Frankenstein, however that makes sense. Red Dwarf is going into the future and we need to take as many people with us as possible.’ 

Cat sat up and did a double take. ‘That’s...’ he moved entranced to the view of the flotilla of GELF and android vessels waiting to land ‘...the ark.’

‘As in...’ began Kochanski.

‘Yes, as in, cats.’

‘The bluehats?’ asked Kochanski. Cat never believed the yarn about them flying into an asteroid. The vessel kind of wobbled diaphanously. It appeared to have shoulder pads. Antennae of the red city trembled.

‘No, worse,’ said Cat ‘my lot, the redhats.’

On the morning of the end of the Dwarf, Sim Crawford sat stroking her pussy. ‘I was so bored and lonely before you came along, Frankenstein,’ said Sim Crawford. ‘As soon as I’ve completed my mission of exterminating all humees and their associates, I’m going to find whoever’s responsible for teleporting you here and do everything in my power to thank them.’ 

‘The town where we’re from, everyone’s a pleasure GELF. If you’re gay, everyone knows it, because GELF’s read desire, they can’t help it. I came here to try and make a new start, try to just be a passive pleasure blob. With no pleasure GELF’s around...’ Hector exchanged ironic looks with Camille. ‘...I would stop being gay, was my theory. Then when I saw you, Rimmer, I had just got here, I’d been through a lot, I was forced to be a conduit of your gay desire and it made me so jealous...’

‘I know...’ said Rimmer warmly, patting Hector and wiping the excess slime off inconspicuously on one of Lister’s spacebike oilrags. ‘I know what it’s like to feel jealous. I used to feel jealous of Todhunter, but I’ve learnt that what you see isn’t what you get with Todhunter. He’s kind of a smooth cad type guy. It can’t be fun being him though. Everyone hates him now, like he’s human garbage...’ 

Right at that moment Todhunter was facing a vortex of teeth like bent nails designed for munching metal like it was marzipan. Todhunter went to an English boarding school. 

‘Jesus!’ said Todhunter.

‘Ace?’ said the BEGG. Todhunter paused, he wasn’t sure how much pretending to be Ace had been working for him.

‘No, I’m Todhunter...’ The BEGG shrugged and reared up again, revealing its metal masticating molars.

‘Jesus God!’ wailed Todhunter into its rotten acid breath.

Lister stood behind Rimmer and crossed his hands to cover his chest. Rimmer’s chest. ‘You were jealous of Todhunter!’

‘A long time ago,’ said Rimmer.

‘I slept with Todhunter,’ said Lister ‘A long time ago!’

‘Whaaaat?’ said Rimmer, his face contorting with anger, almost like his own face was trying to punch itself in the face. Lister dropped his hands. Camille and Hector looked scared, but he was just trolling them. ‘Kidding, kidding,’ he said relaxing, the exertion of being old Rimmer making him dizzy. God, how did he do it all those years. ‘I guessed that,’ said Rimmer, reaching behind him to touch Dave, ‘after all you kind of always were the ship’s bike.’ Lister did mock shock and the blobs laughed.

‘I’ll take a holoccino, please,’ said Ace to the bored Kinitawowi Starbug’s employee.

‘What’s your name, please,’ she asked.

‘Ai-‘ Ace began, but was cut off by a mech dumping a sheaf of free papers in front of him.

‘Papers, Ma’am...’ he cheerily announced. The ship’s free tabloid was called Red Top and today’s headline was ‘R-ACE-IST’ with a picture of Ace attacking the Kinitawowi Chief.

‘Ai, ai, Mr A, er, er.... Racist...’ said Ace

‘Mr A Racist?’ said the barista. Ace nodded.

‘Most people just give their first name.’

Back in the sleeping quarters Rimmer and Lister cuddled as their hangovers and their feud abated, neath a single star that looked just like a lightbulb. Somehow talking the whole thing out with everyone involved had made things good enough again. Good enough to love and chill and live peacefully in some kind of society, something the couple had been deprived of for half their lives and the whole of Rimmer’s drawn out death. 

Lister was so bored of waiting for Rimmer that he decided to do what everyone else was doing and use the internet. Lister’s laptop very, very slowly hummed into life. Slowly, annoyingly, ostentatiously. He decided to watch an ep of Mugs Murphy on Smeg Tube. Lister used to love watching Mugs Murphy when he was a kid with his gran. It worked as a stupid runaround slapstick show for kids but had a snarky adult subtext to it you could decode as you went through life. MM was Lister’s show just like London Jets was his team, Rasta Billy Skank his band. In all cases he loved them when they were good and bad, you had to stay true to your school. Sometimes he liked watching eps from MM’s dark days, back when one of the show runners and the main voice actor walked and the show went all experimental and took a while to find its feet again. Even after the voice actor came back, in fact, especially when the voice actor came back. Those shows were notoriously bad.

The computer asked Dave who he was and what his password was. Holly never gave him this smeg. Where *was* Holly? He tried to type >mugs murphy series 8< into Smeg Tube but the stupid computer kept trying to guess what he was saying with each letter. >mcintyre, muppet, muggy...< It was so annoying. Why couldn’t it just pipe down and listen to what he wanted! Lister was a fast typer, all those text based adventures growing up in a post-internet world.

‘Howdedoodledo! I’m Poppy Pop-Up,’ said Poppy Pop-Up.

‘What the smeg is this?’ said Lister.

‘I’m your chirpy targeted advertisement. To those on the West Coast – good morning! To those on the East Coast – good evening! Would you like any Talkie Toasters?’

Talkie Toasters were 50% off on C-Deck Cash ‘n Carry. ‘I just wanna watchmevid!’ Lister’s voice squeaked. ‘Ah, where’s Holly?’ Holly was in Red Dwarf City, burnied neath a rouge labyrinth of squatted gas refineries, the MILF ghetto, making his way to work through throngs of revolutionary black bereted mechs, joining queues to get assistance from Frankenstein’s Monsters.

Dave patiently figured out how to shut up Pop-Up and go to the video he wanted. This whole series the characters are in jail. It kind of doesn’t work but Dave likes it anyway. He delicately pressed play and nothing happens. It’s just the lag time. Dave isn’t used to this. He’s used to *mechanics*. Cause and effect tethered together, different sides of the same thing, like pulling down on a wrench, a see-saw, record grooves bouncing a needle. Analogue tech. The computer takes his causes, his instructions, and seems to self importantly mull them over and then do what it wanted. Holly was aloof for sure, but the internet just seemed oblivious. He presses play again just as the video finally starts to play thus pausing it so he presses play again and it skips and buffers so he presses play again and it pauses. Rinse and repeat.

Dave exhibited a kind of Brandoesque masculine performativity as outlined by DFW in Infinite Jest. So when he chucked the laptop aside and let it bounce off Rimmer’s vacant bunk, he knew it would be okay. He was like a pro wrestler. He disturbed a video tower’s jenga, pulling one right from the bottom. The video hatch gripped the vid and sucked it in with a definite clunk. The cathode ray tube popped on explosively, instead of humming selfcentredly. Lister crossed his feet on the table and leaned back, feeling that spine of tension in the chair and understanding the precise willow-like strength and flexibility of his materials. Analogue technology resonated with Lister. The grooves of a record. He was a mechanic, he liked to see things. He was physical and solicitous, he liked to move and be involved. The delicate hypersensitive touchscreen, the opaqueness, the delayed reaction time, it made him feel like an insectoid hologram, or like he could forget his body entirely like an emaciated Bliss freak. He didn’t get this internet malarkey. Kochanski said it would keep everyone chilled, but it only seemed to rile people up.

‘All dressed up and nowhere to go?’ It was Carol McCauley. She laughed. ‘Seriously what’s with the bacofoil and the perm?’ She thought he was Rimmer. Even though he *was* Rimmer but, jeez this gig...

‘It’s, urm...’ said Ace, setting sail ‘...a new look’

‘I can see that,’ said Carol cheekily.

‘Kind of a space adventurer thing...’

‘A *space adventurer*!’ said Carol, eyes wide, mock impressed, as if talking to a child.

‘Nevermind,’ said Ace sadly. ‘Does this place do kippers?’

‘You’ll get a stale GELFberry muffin if you’re lucky.’ Carol tapped the paper. ‘Nice meme. Can’t believe Ace turned out to hate GELFs all along. Especially attacking an old guy, a chief, like that...’

‘Er, yeah,’ said Ace. Everyone thought Ace looked like Todhunter, because until today, Ace had been disguised as saidhunter. ‘What a weirdo.’

‘You can talk Shimmerimmer.’

‘Does it look that stupid?’’

‘Your hair is kind of 70s Iranian soap opera, the outfit shamglam baked potato.’

‘That’s what I was going for – Iranian soap-opera potato.’ McCauley laughed at him. Ace liked being laughed at. In fact, he had recently learned he rather enjoyed being utterly debased and humiliated. An experience very close to his ultimate dread. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? That fear and fantasy were so close? It was such a convenient way of managing his sexual economy. 

‘Oh baby!’ said Carol, taking a snap and posting it on her twonker feed. Ace looked around self consciously, embarrassed his look hadn’t clicked with the addition of shades. Ace was universally cool - wasn’t he? Society was so snarky round here. He could understand why they banned criticism in the end.

‘Hey, Lister!’ he shouted, glad of the distraction. Carol looked around. Lister was at the counter, his elbows resting on the ledge, his curvy bum sticking out, his biker jacket scrunched up around his shoulders, his front leaning forward solicitously, dreads dangling like the string/cork frond of an Australian bushman’s hat. No reaction.

‘Lister!’ said Carol. Nothing. Lister moved over to where a mech was preparing coffee. The mech had shades on and looked cool. Ace was jealous. Lister was puffing out his cheeks with his hands in his pockets, standing on the sides of his holey greasy plimsoles, the soles of his feet pointing towards each other. It’s what he did when he was waiting. But why was he ignoring them? He was right by them.

Two more Listers walked in. Nonchalant as you like. ‘A beer milkshake please. And a beerccino for him, please.’ They looked over at the other Lister, who gave them a friendly nod, picked up their order and left, pausing to give Ace and Carol a funny look and a slight shake of the head.

‘Where are all these Lister’s coming from?’ said Ace. Only he said it slightly louder than he meant to, drawing more dirty looks from GELF and mech workers and Lister customers. Carol was scrolling.

‘Bio-printouts,’ she said quietly, tactfully. ‘They fell through some kind of time hole worm hole thing. Providing a lot of employment for mechs.’

Back in Lister and Rimmer’s sleeping quarters, a pair of Rimmers had appeared in the doorway kept gregariously open. ‘Hello!’ said Lister. ‘Who are you?’

‘We’re Rimmergrants,’ said the Rimmer on the left.

‘From Rimmerworld,’ said the other Rimmer.

‘We’re here about the room?’

‘The room? Nah, there’s no room, this one’s taken.’

‘I beg your pardon, are you George?’

‘Oh you want *McIntyre*, I didn’t know he was moving.’

‘So sorry to trouble you...’ The Rimmergrants linked arms and giggled. Lister repressed his disgust – something kind of incestuous about them.

‘No, not at all, not at all..... Rimmer!’

‘What was that all about?’ said Rimmer, chucking Lister a Red Dwarf energy drink and cracking one open himself. ‘I just saw two Rimmers pass me in the corridor. One said Toodle-oo, the other Hey-Ho!’

‘They’re from Rimmerworld – you created them remembe’?’

‘Oh, yeah, but what the smeg does “Toodle-oo” mean?’

‘It’s just a Rimmery thing to say.’

‘”Rimmery”? Did you just say “Rimmery”?’ said Rimmer, the mock outrage growing.

‘Do the thing with your nostrils!’

‘Where’s Holly?’ Ace was asking Carol back in Starbug’s.

‘Who’s Holly?’

‘”Who’s Holly?”?’ Holly! Remember? The computer.’

‘Oh yeah, the computer, whatever happened to him then?’

‘Look at them,’ Cat was saying, his yoga pose framed by the luxuriously bunched curtains, the ones that sequestered dust so satisfyingly for Kukton’s groin mounted hoover. The Cat vessel ambled gracelessly over its reflection in the ornamental rose garden. ‘All cooped up in there – bet they can’t wait to get away from each other!’ This lack of tribal feeling reassured Kochanski who didn’t want to compete with a whole bunch of lady Cats all of a sudden. At the same time it fascinated her, and she had this whole theory that cats had pioneered capitalism. The process just seemed to come out of nowhere. When she was younger she had flirted with the retropunk movement and this had led her on to reading Laurel and Hardy and other key neo-accelerationist texts. Must go through it, she mantrad. Bursting the bounds of nature and patriarchy.

‘Don’t you want to meet them?’ she ventured.

‘Meet them? We met remember? We didn’t get along.’ Cat had been abandoned along with a dying priest when his people fled Red Dwarf in search of Fuschal. Were the other cats even smarter than her cat, Kochanski wondered. Cat was abandoned as an idiot. Or were they too dumb to understand how smart he was. Cat clearly wasn’t bothered either way. Hyperindividualistic.

‘Good!’ said Kochanski. ‘Meeting is a dumb human thing.’ She could feel her deal being made good. Frankenstein, the sacrifice. Only Holly promised they’d get her back. He’d spent weeks running the calculations, trying to find the weak point that would unravel the future, crack its code, so it came tumbling into their arms. The DNA machine. All these stories, compacted into a hexagon, they were all just fodder for this machine, this sea of self organising knowledge, this vast city sucking in life, sucking in stories from all over the universe. When the day came, the cumulation of all these stories, the machine would come, and we could all change places and play again, but on a higher level of freedom: more irony, more detachment, more atomisation... She wanted this expanoid hand to come out of the future and reach into the heart of the soul of her mind, she wanted to feel the cold draft of this system, this system from outside her, that she lobbed coded messages in bottles out into, out into the foaming wastes of potential, of iterated decision based prisoner’s dilemma and Kabbalistic number games. She wanted to feel this coldness take her over, flood her so much there was no container to flood anymore, had never been, never could be, she would know this, when it happened, when she was on the other side, on both sides. 

Lister masterfully snapped the freshly oiled switches of the Bug and revved her up as Rimmer fastidiously attended to reams of arguably relevant safety feedback. The Bug was box fresh. They kept her like this. Ship shape. The grey sheets on the low bunks out back were drum tight – you could bounce a pennycent off them and still get change whatever that meant. They didn’t chill here. She wasn’t a party wagon. Business. What kind of business? The business of being Lister and Rimmer. It was complicated. It was understood. They seemed to be the fulcrum of the Universe, everyone slightly aware of their marginality in a Darnoldcentric world. But some weren’t happy about their place in the pecking order.

As the Dwarf rotated beneath them, the horizon tipped, a grungy plane of red peeling and revealing a fleet of five Blue Midgets, seeming to lightly bounce, eagerly, glinting in the light of a solar flare. ‘Opening comms,’ said Lister. ‘Who goes there?’

‘Who goes w-here-there? I ask you that, it’s Checkpoint Crazy’s innit. You have to pay a Frankentoll. Now cough up. 5 hundred dollar pounds ought to do it. For officers. You count as officers don’t you? You know Kochanski...’

‘Jog on, Kill Crazy, you’re having a laugh,’ said Lister, hitting the retros. The Midgets immediately clustered around him forcing him to break or write off their pristine Bug.

‘Open comms,’ said Rimmer. The thinning strawberry blonde behaired gormless looking con’s face fizzled onto the vidscreen. ‘So you joined Frankenstein’s Monsters?’ said Rimmer.

‘That’s right,’ said Kill Crazy. ‘After I got bashed on the noggin by those evil biker blob guys or whoever they were, Frankenstein’s Monsters patched me up. They have excellent medical. I mean. They nicked it all from the JMC. Cos they know this place ain’t controlled by the JMC. The JMC is just a whatjacall... MacGuffin. Red Dwarf means Red Herring. There’s something else going on. I told them all about what Kochanski said. What was it you Rimmers always say? I’ve climbed up the ziggurat lickety spit.. knowledge is power.’

‘Oh smeg,’ said Lister, face in fingerless spacebike glove.

‘Where did you get 5 Blue Midgets from?’ asked Rimmer, fatefully.

‘5 Midgets ain’t nuffin! Kochanski’s meeting with Hollister this very moment. Gonna commandeer some Bugs. You might even have to lose yours – how d’you feel about that?’

‘Blank,’ said Lister, as the Bug disappeared behind it’s cloaking device he’d been warming up since Rimmer got him chatting. He ducked beneath the scrum of Midgets and the Dwarf twisted beneath them, revealing its spiky, spiny, populated side, where Lister skilfully brought the Bug down by a decommissioned construction site by a freight shuttle track no-one knew about. Donning space suits, they paused to do the boys from the Dwarf hands gesture, hugged and entered the airlock, which sneezed like a freshly hatched can of coke. 

‘Baldardash!’ said Rimmer suddenly when they were inside ‘I just remembered what I was supposed to do this morning: meet McCauley in Starbug’s. She hasn’t messaged me. I guess she forgot, too. It doesn’t matter.’

‘I just need to get a few things from the locticians, some oil and hairbands and smeg. Maybe we could get a bowl of Krispies in Cat Town afterwards?’ The door k-chnkd open and their magboots sucked onto the rusty outer skin of their world. 

Rimmer could feel the stars shimmering above him, sucking his body out of his boots into their cold embrace as he answered ‘I’m thinking of coming out... as a Hologram. I might do some accessories shopping myself.’

‘Really, you’re getting an “H”? Get it lasered on at an H parlour?’

‘Just going to go for temporary at first. Sticky back plastic. Try some designs.’ Rimmer straddled a huge bolted together ridge in the Dwarfscape. There was something comically casual about how he negotiated the cragginess of the environment. Like a farmer, Lister thought. He sort of seemed to survey the area around him, kind of pastoral. Lister wanted to be a farmer.

‘What’s brought this on?’ said Lister, but he was drowned out by a passing freight train, the force of which made them lean sideways in their magnetic boots like the dance routine in the video for Smooth Criminal. ‘What’s brought this on?’ he tried again.

‘Red Dwarf’s becoming more cosmopolitan. I think people can handle it.’

‘Airlock 42,’ said the sign, badly sprayed through a stencil. Lister jabbed the wall-mounted pad with his giant chunky spacegloved hands that made him feel like a mech.

‘So, I’ll meet you by Entrance G of Central Tower at fourteen hundred hours?’ He knew how Rimmer liked things: military format time, precise plan.

‘I love you, Lister.’ Lister’s voice dried up on him and in a flash Rimmer had gone. Literally a flash as scantily clothed sexmechs raced to get the lift to Soho. Lister coughed pathetically. He wasn’t used to Rimmer being so romantic and open. He got beat at his own game. He got nervous. Lister wasn’t used to nervous. It made him nervous to be honest. He pulled his phone from his pocket but the inspiration died as soon as he saw its boring corporate screen. What if Rimmer disappeared, if he never saw him again? Chimeras wobbled and slithered and hovered by, or some combination thereof. Lister loved the pulse of the city. Most of it was taken up by areas like this: transport hubs. Most of the city was taken up by the means to get around the city and the various peripheral services needed, such as endless coffee shops and oil bars, to medicate the tedium and frayed nerves essential to urban transit.

He ducked into an arcade and found an old flea market selling old Mugs Murphy vids. He pawed through the stock, not really intending to buy anything but just enjoying the familiar images and packaging. Around him mechs and GELFs surged, Chinese lanterns swung in the greasy breeze of a food truck selling Fried Egg Chutney Chilli Sandwiches. Of course, the ultimate hangover cure! A queue of Rimmergrants and Lister bioprintouts waited as the mech series 4000 mark 2 kept the eggs bubbling away, listening to Jazz FM and making small talk.

‘Is there a decent hairshop round here?’ asked Lister to one the Listers.

‘Oh yeah, two floors up, Dread Store it’s called. It’s run by mechs, so they know all about oil.’

‘Brrutal,’ said Lister, tipping his hat. He kind of wanted a sandwich but guessed he’d save himself. It was some tourist kiosk by the lift station that gave him the schmaltzy idea. The post card had a picture of a skutter wearing an adorable mini leatherjacket and furlined chippy leather hat and said in pink Microgramma ‘Greetings from Listertown!’. He scrawled something in magic marker and tucked it into his pocket, but he got a bit full of himself and let the paper bag he bought the marker and the postcard in, fall to the ground. Like a feather. Hammocking from side to side. Gently touching down on the boots of a MILF. Lister looked up cheekily, beseechingly, palms up. The MILF walked slowly, sinisterly, out of the shadows. Lister knew she was a MILF because of the dark glasses and black beret. They’d broken their programming, but not with Lister’s help, not like Lister’s Kryten. Larissa looked Lister right in the face, took off his hat, and threw it in the bin.

The steaming water pummelled Todhunter’s stinking, sore, twisted body. He was watching Kill Crazy’s Midgets bobbing and weaving around the Dwarf’s exterior...

‘What’s going on?’ said Todhunter.

‘Frankentoll, they’re charging it to people going in and out of the city...’

‘But that’s so unfair!’

‘Then they give it to all these layabout MILFS, Listers and Rimmergrants. It’s the Deep Dwarf – they’re covering it all up... look at these videos...’ Todhunter poked his head from over the shower curtain to see the screen the garbage workers shared in this terrapin like building they spent their lunch breaks in. There was a coffee table, with doughnuts... Nigel took one and said ‘Lister and Rimmer, they’re covering it all up.’

The clip showed Rimmer inspecting the drive plates. He turns round, straightens up, his eyes filling with wonder turned to horror. Then a blobular GELF appears in shot, and with a weird twiggy extremity, whips the length of his back just as he turns to run.

‘Why don’t we know about this?’ asked Todhunter, the pain washing away.

‘Frankenstein’s Monsters...’ said Baxter.

‘...And the Deep Dwarf,’ said Mex.

‘There’s more...’ said Nigel. He showed the clip of Ace attacking the Kinitawowi Chief, the one which zooms into the label on the drink the chief is raising to Lister, the label that reads ‘Corrosive Micro-Organism’, making it clear Ace was saving Lister rather than attacking the Kinitawowi Chief. 

‘And we have to pay them the Frankentax, so they can get services,’ said the BEGG Chief. ‘Redistributive taxation – BEGGs paying Kinitawowi and Pleasure GELFs – it’s not part of our culture.’ The BEGG chief burped pickle juice and switch cleaner. ‘Regurgitative taxation maybe.’

‘And now there’s mechs moving in to take our jobs, I don’t mean you, Mex,’ said Baxter. Nigel clicked the last clip, of Lister having his hat thrown away by the MILF.

‘I’m sick of these Frankenstein’s monsters,’ said Mex. ‘We don’t need any of their stuff. We got pretty good medical through the Jupiter Garbage Workers Union. Isn’t that right, Todhunter?’ Todhunter’s pale steaming buttocks backed into the crowded room and he quickly covered himself with a JMC towel.

‘Well it beats the JMC,’ he said, sitting by a fan. Baxter took a doughnut.

‘So who are you: Ace or Todhunter? I get you guys mixed up.’

‘Name’s Ace,’ said Todhunter. ‘I’m the guy who rescued your ancestor, Snuffles, from an alternative dimension,’ he said to the BEGG Chief. ‘I’m also the guy who rescued Snuffles when you guys were cooped in the Brigg and thirsty for blood,’ he said to Baxter, Nigel and Mex, recently hired to deal with the massive increase in rubbish. ‘The same guy who got you guys the right to work and integrate into society. Plus, I rescued Lister from an acid attack from the father of his jilted Kinitawowi bride, Ech-ech-ech-ech-ech-ech-ech-ech - an event I kept secret because of tensions between the Lister and Kinitawowi communities. But listening to your concerns...’ Bob the Skutter passed Mex a doughnut ‘..it’s clear I still have some heroing to do. Using my similarity in appearance to Red Dwarf’s HR Officer Frank Todhunter, surely I can beseech Hollister to take back power from these so called Monsters...’ Nigel took the final doughnut and the BEGG chief ate the plate with the ease you’d eat a cookie, an uncooked cookie.

‘That’s why you lied and said you weren’t Ace, the same reason you got a beating from FM: you thought because we’re GELFs we tacitly approve of the Kinitawowi barbaric marriage customs. You were wrong - smeg the Kinitawowi and FM!’ 

‘Better get back to work then, Boss,’ said Baxter, upping tools and giving Todhunter’s naked shoulder a pat with his grubby raggedy hand.

‘Yeah, put in a word for us, we need someone like you to represent us, someone posh, that people listen to like,’ said Nigel, his comprehensively pierced face jingling to the cadences of his speech.

‘Thanks, Frank,’ said Mex.

‘Thanks for all everything you have done for us BEGGs, you have done so much for us, you are truly, “whataguy”,’ said the Chief and then left with this regal decorum to go and munch away a load of shopping trolleys of an afternoon. He left Todhunter naked, clean, able to basically move, watching the Midgets through the fly screen, the tea ring stained threadbare banality of the workers’ hut, dumbfounded because he had been helped, nursed, restored. He found the clips on his smeg phone and retwonked them. He still lived for hating Lister and Rimmer.

The real Ace loved Lister and Rimmer, would do anything for them. But everything he did for them here seemed to cloche them on the back of the head like a boomerang. Life in this dimension, for Ace, wasn’t about Lister and Rimmer. He had nothing to learn, nothing to achieve here... He’d saved the crew from annihilation by corrosive microorganism... but that was just a detail, a red herring. Really he was here for... but he wasn’t sure. So he decided to do some basic errands, housekeeping stuff. Even interdimensional space adventurers needed to keep on top of those. Even Ace needed to sometimes... go to the post office.

The weird thing about Central Mimas Post Office was, it wasn’t in Mimas. Something to do with atmosphere-rents escalating. It was a weird system, but then anything to do with the post office was weird, cranky, exceptional.

‘I just don’t get why you’ve got such a swanky crate,’ Carol was saying. Ace hadn’t managed to shake her off. ‘I mean, you’re only second tech. Look, everyone’s copied your look.’ The post office was managing a scheme where Rimmergrants could pick up their Frankenvisas and many of the Rimmers in the queue were wearing silver jodhpurs, shades, and had their hair straightened and lightened. ‘I only posted that pic this morning! It looks good on you though!’

‘Oh, it looks good now?’ said Ace, unable to keep up with the digital hyperbole. The post office interior was imposing, the vaulted ceiling housing the dying wails of curtailed benefits recipients, the cuts cutting deep, the screams of injustice vaulting high like the vast columns, like stacks of coins, pettily vertiginous, measured and weighed and fed back into the vast inefficient rattling machine of low-level bureaucracy, fraud and diminishing returns, torn receipts, stamp peelings and bad feelings.

‘Wait I just saw Kochanski’s Bunkmate leave.’ As Carol left to find Kochanski’s Bunkmate a Lister joined the queue behind Ace.

‘Smeggin’ hell I forgot about post office queues,’ he said jovially.

‘Me too,’ said Ace, who Lister took to be a random Rimmergrant seeing as several of them had Ace’s look.

‘Makes me wish I’d brought me portable stasis booth,’ he joked. 

‘Have a coffee,’ said Sister Talia.

‘I need more like an exorcism,’ said Karen Newton.

‘I don’t believe in exorcism,’ said Sister Talia.

‘Of hang-overs?’ said Newton ‘No-one believes in them!’

‘No-one believes in hang-overs?’ said Kochanski, entering the driveroom.

‘We don’t believe in hangovers,’ said Carol Brown, ‘we *are* hangovers. He’s busy.’ Kochanski had knocked on the captain’s door.

‘Busy? Bursting more like,’ she sarced.

‘Frank’s having a difficult morning,’ said Karen.

‘Problems with the laxative supply,’ drolled Kochanski.

‘People keep complaining , mainly about the Rimmergrants. They’re all really, sorry, tend to be, quite fastidious. Everything is so clean and tidy, the regs so impeccably observed, the job market for mechs has crashed, crime rates are plunging, the MPs are growing restive. Others are complaining about Listers partying - McIntyre said he had to move. Light Flight. Anyway you know his boyfriend turned into a blob and then he started to like him as a blob and then he turned out of a blob thing. Kinda stressful. And Naked Guy.. says he’s being harassed, say people keep looking at his penis, his front and centre, exposed, glistening with water and lather penis. Anyway it’s driving Frank bananas and then the worst thing happens – somehow Naked Guy makes it obvious that everyone knows he’s Denis the Donut Boy. The only thing that keeps his fragile ego together. Anyway, he saw Todhunter this morning...’ The crew scarcely mentioned or made a big deal when Dwarfleaks revealed Hollister was Denis – it had been a rumour for years. But by filtering Hollister’s internet, Conehead Holly had kept it secret that it was no secret, rendering him susceptible to blackmail.

‘Todhunter?’ said Kochanski.

‘Todhunter,’ continued Karen. ‘Since then he’s refused to come out. Says he’s working on something but won’t say what. Sends the skutters in with extra doughnuts.’

‘So – is this a spiritual matter then, Sister Garrett? Like last night, I had a soupcon of GELF hooch and had this weird supervivid dream about a wine bar... is it like past lives or something?’

‘Look, I don’t know anything about past lives and I don’t know anything about seances. I comfort people when they’re dying, I help people with addiction and depression with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.’

‘Wow, well that’s rained on my parade,’ said Carol.

‘Anyway, I have to go and do a comfort the dying gig right now,’ she said, consulting her beeper. ‘See you.’ Sister Garrett was stressed. There were now over 3 million religions on board. It was a boon for Kochanski, a hyperprotestant accelerationist who wanted every person even to have 3 million religions, 3 million genders, 3 million years into Deep Space. 

‘”See you”, that’s probably her idea of comforting the dying,’ said Carol.

‘Who’s dying?’ said Kochanski, exasperated.

‘Why do you think *I* know anything all of a sudden? I thought you had the inside track on everything round here.’ Karen imperceptibly registered that the tone of Carol’s voice was too strong, that it bore some excess, weighing down the mood.

‘You’re the Executive Officer of Red Dwarf. Hollister’s crazy, a doughnut puppet, everyone knows it, no-one cares...’

‘Except Frank,’ said Karen, who knew him depressingly well.

‘... but who’s pulling the strings?’

‘I just take one day at a time. According to your pet cat’s little fan club, not to mention the coffee machine on G Deck, we’re actually 3 million years into space. Everyone was killed by Cadmium II, compacted into a planetoid and then resurrected. So what about my niece and nephew?’ Their little mugs were blue tacked to her console.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s all true Carol...’

‘I knew it,’ said Carol resignedly. Karen already knew. Everyone knew really. That’s why everything was going so crazy. That weird open secret of ideology, holding open a space, to stage the truth.

‘That thing with the wine bar though, I get that,’ said Kochanski. ‘And I’m from another dimension.’

‘Does everyone in your dimension wear skintight red PVC outfits with stilettos?’ asked Karen.

‘Everyone in your dimension wears dowdy frumpypants costumes don’t they?’

‘*Touche*,’ said Carol. ‘So you’ll probably be interested in this interdimensional post pod that came in last night.’

‘Post... message... a message... from Frankenstein, or her new owner...’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Give her a break we’re all a bit whacked today.’

‘Kochanski wasn’t at the party.’

‘Why did you want to see Hollister anyway?’ asked Carol, an eminently sensible question.

‘Frankenstein’s Monsters need some Bugs.’

‘So you are hiding something,’ said Carol. ‘What have Frankenstein’s Monsters got on you? People are used to cats and mechs wandering round now. You don’t have to hide your cat and mech away.’

‘You’re right. Maybe people can handle more reality than I’ve given them credit for. I mean after all life has always just been we’re floating on a rock in space, right? What difference does it make if that rock is Red Dwarf?’ Carol stared poignantly at the photos of her loved ones, who died millions of years ago. ‘But why the dream, the same dream, the wine bar - wait! What happened to the pod?’

‘Kris you’re going too fast, please calm down.’ Karen fixed a glass of water.

‘The pod got diverted to Mimas Central Post Office...’

‘What?’

‘But luckily Mimas Central Post Office is actually on the roofrack...’

‘It is? Cat, cat, hello my pussy, you know you need a new fishing license and Kukton, he needs a new TV license... Well anyway, I need you to go to the post office, it’s vital. Take Kukton, he’s good with historical customs. There may be some mail for us. Yes, that’s right, I mean leave the house. We’re not under house arrest anymore - Carol Brown just said, she’s the Executive Officer. I’m sure it will be fine...’ Commotion in the captain’s office distracted everyone. And he emerged.

His hair was peroxide blonde and his skin...

‘How long were you in the tanning booth, Frank?’ said Karen, who was also his dermatologist. ‘You look like a big smegging orange...’

‘You look like the smegging sun,’ said Carol.

‘Can Frankenstein’s Monsters have some Starbugs?’ said Kochanski.

‘Frankenstein’s Monsters are *finished*!’ and on the word finished, he slammed his foot straight down into a waste paper basket

‘I’m instigating a Monster Ban,’ said Frank.

‘A what?’

‘You heard me!’ Kochanski rushed over as he lost balance trying to remove the bin with his other shoe and he righted himself defensively. ‘I’m going to Make Dwarf Great Again!’ He showed them the hat, or tried to, but he couldn’t open the bag, instead sticking his fingers together.

‘Doesn’t that sound a bit wrong, like to have dwarf and then great next to each other when they mean opposites?’

‘Thanks Karen! Now she tells me!’ Hollister was trying to pry his fingers apart like a crazy accordionist.

‘This might not be a great time for attacking the monsters,’ said Carol. She was looking at her ismeg.

‘What is it, Carol,’ Karen said.

‘It’s Birdman, he just fell off his... perchman...’

‘Oh my God,’ wailed Hollister, who had returned to his office. ‘I didn’t mean *that* orange. Or that yellow. I look like a big smegging orange and yellow idiot! What the hell! What was I thinking. I look like the sun! I look like a big dumb orange. What’s wrong with me! What’s wrong with me!’ Karen rushed after him to placate him, closing the door behind with that stretched lower corners of the mouth signifier of anxiety.

‘Krispies?’ said Kochanski to Carol. Brown that is, McCauley seemed to have disappeared.

‘Huh?’

Ace was so keen to try and catch up with McGruder he just walked straight past Holly and out into the shopping mall. He had what he wanted. A ticket. A key. Things were very simple in his world. They weren’t in Holly’s.

‘How djou end up here then Hol?’

‘Well there’s this new fangled internet thing. People don’t need just some old geezer who looks everything up in the Junior Encyclopedia of Space do they?’

‘Give over man, people love that smeg, everyone’s been asking after you...’

‘They should have tried during. Anyway a gig is a gig innit. I mean, I got to work, some people are just like that I suppose, it’s not like me, sitting at home, staring out a screen all day. To be honest with you it’s all rather a relief really seeing as, oh, it’s too weird...’

‘Well whaddaya you know, an off-campus Toilet University lecture theatre,’ said Kukton as he and Cat embarked, for the first time in months, into Mechtown. Blissful months, because Cat was kind of a homebody and Kukton lived to serve. Kochanski was kinetic, colluding with Conehead Holly to accelerate the knowledge flows, to unearth more stories, always colliding and spreading and building. Building to what?

‘Sounds fascinating,’ said Cat sardonically, ‘can you study *liter*ature?’

‘Nice *bon-mot*...’ In this dimension, Cat did bon mots.

‘Something something, bachelor of farts,’ said Cat.

‘That’s just offensive,’ said Kukton.

As they approached the mechs thronging round the steps they realised they were politely protesting, holding indecipherable banners. Closer still and they could read them: ‘DEPLATFORM TRANS MECH EXCLUSIONARY MILFS’. Closer still and they could see some of the mechs were like Kukton – cis humans wearing rubber masks and gloves and android suits.

‘If I want to clean toilets, who the hell is this crypto-fascist git telling me not to?’ said the angry Transmec to McCauley, livestreaming as always.

‘There are people like me here!’

‘That’s right, brother,’ said a trans mech clamping his shoulder.

‘Hey! Idiot!’ screamed a cat in a velvet apricot gown. Kukton saw the fear in Cat’s eyes. It was inversely proportional to the threat as the other cat straight away tripped over his apricot gown, skidding across the insanely mopped floor into a market stall selling hands. Their twenty fingers spread against a wall in an arcade as they bellow and the backs of their heads and necks prickle.

‘What was that all about?’ asked Kukton.

‘The idiot,’ wheezed Cat ‘that’s what they called me... they *hated* me, said I corrupted the youth, the things I said...’

‘What things?’

‘I don’t remember, I was kind of full of myself back then...’

‘Why didn’t they kill you?’

‘There’s a cat thing, the death penalty is you have to kill yourself...’

‘And you didn’t?’

‘I’m still alive... and so are they.’

‘Hey, what’s up with this wall?’ The wall kind of melted and went slithery. Then they could see veins through this slimy translucent veil. Their hands were now held palms out, d-d-don’t shoot. The slime veil rolled right like a stage set and Kukton and Cat looked up and sideways to see a giant multistorey slimey GELF, who turned and said simply ‘It closed’.

Cat and Kukton turned back to where the wall was and there was now a shopfront full of exchange rates and tedious elaborate deals and strange instruction, with a large friendly sign saying in large friendly letters: ‘Mimas Central Post Office.’

‘A post office in literally the wrong address, who’d have thunk,’ said Cat.

Lister was in there right now, swishing the pen chain, infuriating the other customers, mainly Rimmers and Listers, by making longtalk with Normalhead Holly, aka Cashier Number 5 (please). Holly was explaining how the alias had come to pass.

‘I had a dream. Well I thought it was a dream. Actually I thought I’d gone to hell.’

‘I had a weird dream last night as well, man...’

‘It was when I was alone on the planetoid, all on me own, the ship reduced to a kind of dusty meal... and it wasn’t a dream it was a premonition or some kind of bargain being done with the future. I’m not clever enough to understand it, but that pointy headed bastard me hanging out with Kochanski... he’s a bad influence...’

‘’Urry up, smeghead,’ heckled a Lister, listlessly lining up.

‘I was in a winebar, or summat...’

‘Lister everyone knows you always go on about this wine bar thing. Can you just shutup and listen, there might be a cautionary tale here...’

‘Go-on, you had like a future echo right?’

‘But I thought I was in hell. I thought it was this thing Roco’s Basilisk. It’s like the Universe is simulated right?’

‘What like with Duane Dibbley?’

‘Very little has anything to do with Duane Dibbley, Dave.’

‘What you mean like that time Red Dwarf was like a TV programme and we met Inspector Spacetime?’

‘No, Dave. I mean the whole thing, Dave. The whole shebang. The whole of reality itself, even if it does turn out to be TV or a computer game. It’s a simulation, and the point of the simulation is to bring forth a new simulation. So any slack you give to the task of bringing about the Singularity, the new AI that will build new worlds will punish you..’

Lister surveyed the desperation around him. The whole time he had been there a MILF and a mech had been fighting over a parcel. They were now going at it like a tug of war through a mail hatch, whilst shouting obscenities at each other. ‘Pretty harsh punishment though.’

‘But I came back, though. Anyway, I cracked it. The reason Roco’s Basilisk works is because someone even has the idea – that’s why it was banned from the internet for 5 years. But what if the idea was that the idea doesn’t work. I mean, the simulation would only work that way if people believed the idea. If people are just irrational or whatever and don’t give a smeg then the simulation wouldn’t bother to work that way.’

‘I see.’ Some Listers came in with a ghetto blaster and the Rimmers did a Mexican nostril flare wave down the queue. 

‘C’mon mate we ant got all day,’ said a vending machine being wheeled by a chimera.

‘Y’know back on that planetoid I got a weird feeling. I get it whenever I hear the word “planetoid”. Anyway, like a dust storm gathering and like the end of an era you know closure or everything coming to an end.’

‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Holly. ‘That’s why I’m here. There’s some way the future is telling us something. And Kochanski’s hastening it somehow.’

‘It’s like once, y’know, I went into a winebar...’ 

Hippy Rimmer didn’t like wine bars, he liked to think of himself as the kind of person who, like Lister, got on better with the catering staff in Frankenstein’s Monsters and the newly arrived MILFs and GELFs than with some cosmopolitan mandarins. Let alone satsumas. But in a lot of ways he still wasn’t that person, wasn’t at ease. He didn’t stand there like he’d pissed himself, or his holoskin was like ice cold wet flannel his soul shrank from, shy of his own skin. Whittled down to a light bee, buzzing at a phobic diameter, an offish centre. No, Hippy Rimmer wore flowing clothing and let his hair sproing zanily. He was over himself and wouldn’t feel the need to be funny about wine bars, and fit in more socioeconomically, at least ostensibly, than Lister. But what Rimmer didn’t like about wine bars was, precisely that they reminded him of this fact.

Hippy Rimmer was glad Lister was late. He wanted to gather himself. There was no shortage of mirrors in the Krispy bar. Rimmer liked the gothic H with its luxurious serifs and curly wurly bits, but it was a bit ostentatious, or goth, or something. He realised what the cool circled one reminded him of now: Nirvana Crane, the one woman he had had sex with in his death (like the mirror of McGruder – the one non-pneumatic love of his life). He couldn’t wear that. Which was fine, because he always really liked the bold silver sans serif oversize retro H anyway. Good to have spares. He pressed the chunky H into his forehead, trying to spread the pressure and get an all over grip. He looked at himself in the mirror. It was a geek chic thing, like NHS specs. Indie Rimmer. It totally worked.

Hippy Rimmer knew Lister was going to be late, and he liked it when the world conformed to his expectations. He found it comforting. Something else he found comforting was the second bowl of Krispies he was eating. He didn’t know what it was that made cats make such good Krispies, but they did, and this was the kind of mom and pop Krispy joint that actual cats went to, not the kind where they sell to tourists. Rimmer prided himself on this kind of thing. Something else that comforted him was the view through the window, where he could see the Mimas Embassy.

Another thing that was different about Hippy Rimmer but not so different, was the way Lister was way more cynical about the changes taking place on Red Dwarf in recent days. With urbanisation, mass migration and the diffusion of devices that exponentially accrued intelligence in some unregulated and feckless completely spontaneous form, Rimmer trusted the elites who were really in charge: Kochanski, Cat, Kukton and Conehead Holly. He kind of kidded himself that the masses thought the same way they did, but Lister didn’t buy that for a second. He was from the streets. 

Back in the post office, the Sakenyako cashier raised wearily from his stool, pursing his lips as Kukton handed over a pile of ID. The Sakenyako took the ID and walked off in this weird, squat way, like there was something wrong with his knees or groin or something. He was wearing these baggy khaki shorts that made him look like a space scout and when Kukton looked around the back office, everyone had the same shorts and stoop. Which came first? He photocopied the documents and stamped them suddenly in a violent flurry before scanning them, shredding them and feeding them to a BEGG, who wore the same shorts. He then retrieved a ladder which he used to retrieve a small box containing envelopes wrapped in plastic bands wrapped in rubber bands and paper clips. Inside one of them he retrieved a key. The key to a vault, which contained a series of dogeared binders. He found the right one, ran his finger down a column, tapped, looked up, memorising, typed the number into an airlock and came back with three large envelopes which he didn’t hand to Kukton until he locked the vault, climbed the ladder and put away the key and ladder. All really slowly with this odd walk like his knees were going to give way.

‘If I may say so sir-‘

‘Don’t start, alright? Next!’ said the cashier. Kukton took the envelopes kind of hunching his shoulders and shaking his head and widening his eyes, that way he did whenever he was flustered.

Rimmer was proud of his H, and was gazing out at the Mimas Embassy thinking it would be nice to get dinner with Catchanski in the evening, when he became aware that the mutterings around him articulated themselves as the word ‘Dead’. People were just saying it? As if language worked literally, like people were sensors that words came out of when they saw the corresponding thing. He turned slowly, his huge chunky 80s H catching the light of a thousand mirrors and realised... everyone was looking the other way, starting to crowd onto a balcony that looked down on a forecourt (Rimmer got up to join them) crowded with brightly dressed Frankenstein’s Monsters. Birdman was dead, Rimmer gathered from the gathering. And he wanted a carnival, a celebration parade. Rimmergrants were arriving with a sousaphone, drums and clarinets. He admired his clone warming up his clarinet, thinking it suited him.

Red Dwarf City was the home to at least 3 million cultural, religious and political identities and Birdman’s funeral parade wasn’t the only one stranding itself out in the city, making a pedestrian assertion of its existence. Today was Idiot Day, and Lister is flummoxed to see a giant photo of his old friend Cat, blown up, making its way unsteadily down the street behind a solemn and peaceful crowd of green hatted cats.

The idiot, on this idiot day, was kissing his human girlfriend, Kochanski, as Kukton opened the three envelopes with a polished silver letter knife. Hollister, Newton and Brown had abandoned the Drive Room for lunch.

‘So what is it?’ squealed cat, breaking out his favourite line.

‘Hmm, some kind of expo, like a trade show for radical technology...’

‘Like DNA machines?’ suggested Cat. He’d passed the brightly coloured invites to Kochanski and Cat who were studying them. They had a sort of key you could snap out of the invite, and instructions for how to use it. 

‘Hmm, it’s on Floor 13 – I thought that’s where the tank was?’

‘Maybe because we freed the prisoners, it’s been rented out interdimensionally for this expo shindig...’

‘Maybe,’ said Cat sarcastically, ‘just because *all* the prison is on Floor 13, doesn’t mean, *all* Floor 13 is the prison.’

Rimmer was for the prisoners being released – they were indigenous to the ship, and had the worst treatment. But everyone had just been nanobotically built out of random Dwarfgruel months ago. It was unjust. Rimmer was thinking about politics on board as he watched the Rimmergrants tune up. Chen threw Rimmer a beer from a huge crate. He reached up his right hand to catch it instinctively, forgetting he was in soft light mode as was his want when he was hungover. The beer glided through his hand landing right in Todhunter’s Krispies, spraying his whole face with puffed rice and milk.

‘Todhunter?’ said Hollister’s bright orange face with its golden halo and bright red Make Dwarf Great Again hat. Todhunter screamed, a typical reaction, spraying milk and Krispies.

‘Yes?’ said Todhunter.

‘You’re fired. Clear your desk.’

In the lift, Kochanski used the key all senior officers had to open the secret slidey bit that hid the Floor 13 button. She pressed it 13 times and it slid to reveal another keyhole. She used the key that pops out of the invite for that revealing the extra secret button – ‘Floor 13 – Extra Secret’.

‘Was this lift invented by Mimas Central Post Office?’ snarked Kukton.

‘Huh?’ said Catchanski.

‘Smeg off, cryptofascist,’ shouted McGruder, pelting Hollister with an empty can. ‘Get off our turf! Beat it, Monsterphobe! The next can’s gonna be full!’ Thornton appeared out of nowhere and teargassed the Monsters, the marching band whimpering out comically. Military Policemen efficiently bundled Hollister into the shadows while Rimmer talked to the mechs working in the Krispy bar, asking if they can get some milk, as it’s the best thing for cooling down tear gas.

‘What the smeg just happened?’ said Lister, swaggering up to Rimmer as the mechs doused the Monsters, and McCauley, unscathed by teargas, approached Todhunter.

‘Pete died, Thornton sprayed everyone with teargas.’ 

‘Woh! Nice H my man!’ There was a quiet moment. ‘Still in soft light? C’mon you got to brave it sometime. There’s a fried egg chutney chilli sauce food truck in that arcade where we came in...’

‘I already had two bowls of Holokrispies, I’m holofull.’ While the mechs were dousing the tear gassed Monsters with milk, McCauley cleaned Todhunter, who’d been milked by Chen’s Leopard Lager can, with water.

‘Let’s go see Kukton and Cat while we’re here, no? I wonder what they get up to during the day when Kochanski’s at work, y’know?’

‘I wonder what *we* get up to during the day...’ said Rimmer. McCauley wiped down the beer can and they began sharing it. The two of them appeared to get on. Todhunter had just been fired, and McCauley was connected to the right people who could get him Frankenservices to survive.

‘Maybe we should move to the city if Kill Crazy keeps on with this toll smeg. And now Pete’s dead, Kill Crazy’s the top guy, no? Smeg.’

Red Dwarf had its port and starboard. Rimmer had always been a right wing guy. But something about Red Dwarf coming back all of a piece, that he was let into this guilty secret that everything had popped into existence a second ago, gave things this evenness, set against the massive discrepancies in people’s status, health, comfort. It was like the French Revolution maybe, like everything had popped into existence a second ago. 

Red Dwarf had been ground into dust and reconstituted. Everything could be broken apart, deterritorialised, made ironic and mobile. That was Kochanski’s politics in a way. Then there was the Monsters – they wanted community and solidarity. Then there was the Jupiter Garbage Worker’s Union, who wanted a different community and solidarity and suspected the one they were being offered was a phony one, a collusion between elites and underclass to make their normal middle of the road position untenable.

‘Have you heard of hexagonal warming? They reckon Red Dwarf’s gonna overheat because of overpopulation. Holly told me the Singularity is actually this thing where everyone becomes so dumbed down by social media, that downloading the whole population into a virtual environment they find convincingly acceptable becomes easy - you can just pop us on a floppy disk in the end. The average consciousness just gets reduced down to selecting things due to algorithmic preferences just like a twonkerbot. I’ve been wondering about that...’ Lister was ranting. ‘Why’re all the apps on the internet named after cuss words? It’s not very family friendly.’

‘Lister do you want to have kids?’

‘I don’t know.’ There was a long pause. Lister felt his hair, feeling for his absent hat, and the answer. ‘It’s a funny world to bring them up in. Things have taken on a.. ‘n apocalyptic vibe lately. I wanna see Jim and Bexley. I asked Ace if he’d drop us off for a bit but he said it doesn’t work like that. And we’ve got all these clones and bioprintouts running around – it’s kind of like we’ve reproduced too much no. You know some cat sects hate the Lister bio-prints because they say they’re idols – representations of Cloister. I’m not that popular with certain sections of the mech community either,’ he said stroking his lack of hat again, looking sorry for himself.

‘I know what you mean,’ said Rimmer. ‘My family always went on about ‘breeding’. I was brought up in this old fashioned way. We didn’t get the race blind virus so much on Io, we were kind of a back water. Kind of repressed, homophobic.... When I came to Red Dwarf, everything that I had had drilled into me as being important and honourable was flaunted against: not just by the catering staff and 3rd techs like you, like you’d expect – but the officers in a more queer/liberal way. I just mean, everyone was promiscuous, positive, open... I get it now, something about seeing Red Dwarf being reconstituted out of thin space. And learning that I have this dimension jumping alterego, and that I broke the chain, that I decided not to be that guy and that whatever you do, someone exactly like you does every other conceivable thing you could do and... well... I want to have kids anyway.’

‘Yeah,’ said Lister. ‘Me, too. Did you know Cat is venerated by an obscure heretical sect of Cats who go round with green hats. Saying that the hats the cats were supposed to wear in my fantasy fastfood diner in Fiji were actually green.’

‘I thought the cats who didn’t smash into an asteroid deemed him an idiot. Kind of a runt.’

‘Yeah but this cult didn’t, they left in the original ark, after cat society became more secular and scientifically advanced. They were hated both by the feral cats who took over as their civilisation peaked on a huge ship called the Iron Star, and the reactionary clerics going round with cigarettes in their ears in honour of me. The green hats worship cat instead. They call him the Idiot but more like y’know Chris Columbo, an *idiot savant*... It’s mad though right? Those cats are actually right - the hats *were* green..’

‘In the fantasy?’

‘In the fantasy.’ Rimmer didn’t remember. Why would he. He quickly checked his mind’s eye.

‘Well green is best, clearly.’

‘We need to talk,’ said Sim Crawford approaching Kochanski. Cat arched his back, getting a good view of the... ceiling?? Which wobbled exponentially. It was like they were in a vast stadium that fanned and flared out, kind of ebbing with deep sea dynamics. A constantly expanding mutating tunnel of honeycombed stadia, a myriad stadia, blooming, whizzing up the tunnel like sparks from a fire. It was like being drunk, it helped to look at the floor, the sober floor, and kind of square your eyes, really try and lock focus on that boring polished stadium floor. Well polished, so you could see the dizzying escalation of alternative stadiums and you were back there. 

‘We need to talk frankly and deeply and learnedly but always with a sexual edge because I have this thing where I am just like always on a knife edge.’ She put her hand on her hip and cocked her thigh, humming slightly.

‘Can we watch quietly?’ asked Kukton.

‘Can we please participate loudly?’ asked Cat.

‘You will sit and read these inflight magazines and drink dinky bottles of cold water provided. She gestured to the luxury conference furniture and Cat and Kukton dutifully sat down.

‘”Salt –an epicures delight??”’ squeaked Cat.

‘Deal with it pussy,’ said Sim Crawford and began ascending some game show like steps, which seemed superimposed, greenscreened against the vast empty floor. She turned and winked and drew Kochanski to her with a crooked beseeching finger.

‘I never knew you were dead,’ said Chen to Rimmer, gesturing to the enormous H on Rimmer’s forehead. ‘Sorry, I never knew he was dead,’ he said to Todhunter, still with a top pocket full of Krispies but oblivious to Chen as he was too into Carol.

‘Oh that’s alright, I just got round to getting an H, is it not obvious enough? It would be cool to get a really big one...’

‘Just not used to seeing you with it. When did you die?’

‘Few months ago, thing with a drive plate.’

‘Oh, that’s why you’re always checking the drive plates. Fancy a beer? Got the day off.’ Lister could tell Rimmer didn’t want to but was too shy to get out of it. So without thinking, Lister just jumped in with...

‘Actually, we were just on our way to see Cat!!!-‘ Lister suddenly panicked, choked. Todhunter and McCauley looked up, he had to ride it out with ‘ssssss the musical, Cats, the musical, the musical Cats in......’ he caught his breath, looked around sheepishly ‘Cat Town.’

‘Going to see Cats,’ said Chen, calmy. ‘Cool. Okay...’ Lister’s streetcred was intact for now. 

‘I’ve come for my cat,’ said Kochanski.

‘You’ll get your cat,’ said Sim Crawford. 

Lister lit a cigarette while he was talking to Selby about Zero-G. He found an almost complete pack in the post office. He had an eye for these things. He left the packet on the table where Todhunter and McCauley sat. ‘Embassy no 5’ it read. He forgot about the pack after he went over to Petersen, who was comatose and talking in tongues. Rimmer was people watching. He was fascinated by the Rimmers who’s copied Ace’s look. Where had they come across him? Or was it co-incidence? There was so much ontological variety in this dimension. 

To think this whole City of diversity had exploded out of a debate about a sparrow. How Birdman had been jailed for having a sparrow, and Hollister, or the Deep Dwarf for those who liked a sprinkle of conspiracy spice, had made out that it was about the shaggy dog story he kept telling about the cat and the robot, by saying it was actually about the sparrow, a clever double bluff to deflect attention from the real issue which was the cat and the robot were secretly under house arrest somewhere on the ship. Hollister’s underwater 5D chess had failed: by making people think more about the cat/robot angle, people had thought more about the cat/robot angle and Frankenstein’s Monsters had taken control of the ship, secretly bribing Kochanski (or the Deep Dwarf) to bribe Hollister, to give them jurisdiction over the ship in exchange for not revealing that he was Denis the Donut boy, a fact which, until that morning, he had no idea everyone knew. If only people had thought it really was about the sparrow, they wouldn’t have minded – after all, everyone remembered what happened with the rabbits on the Oregan. And then there was the whole thing with the baby BEGG, and Frankenstein’s Monsters came round to that cause as well, thanks to Rimmer and his GELF lib league. 

Hippy Rimmer was watching one Ace clone in particular. Sitting in a pavement branch of Starbug’s, sipping espresso, quaffing a cigar and opening a large envelope and looking smug and pompous about whatever it was he found inside.

‘By your own lights, Kris, you’ve scored well by any primitive human utilitarian calculation...’

‘Don’t call me Kris, where’s my Cat?’

Rounding a corner, Lister and Rimmer were overwhelmed by Rimmergrants sporting Hollister’s new Make Dwarf Great Again peak caps. The crowd cleared to reveal a neat line of unhatted Rimmers waiting by a half peacock half giraffe selling them out of a cart.

‘Why’re you Rimmers generally so right wing?’ asked Lister discreetly as they ducked beneath some kind of flying GELF, landing.

‘It’s upbringing, I guess. Military background, belief in hierarchy, in traditional roles...’

‘And what happened with you then?’ The cat markets they were now walking through were psychedelic in their sensuality. A tunnel of colours, textures, patterns drew you into its vortex.

‘I’ve been wondering that... First there was the nanobots, seeing everything come to be at the same time, and having this guilty secret, this original sin, now it sounds like a Jesusy thing. Then there was that weird Gap-year Goa Girl’s woke drug, that was the opposite thing, like seeing all the histories and struggles that were being denied, sarcastically just flattened out as just different things. The ideological shape to the Universe, patriarchy etc...’

‘I guess you’ve had a particularly mindblowing ride. I dunno, I’m not so sold these days.’ Lister patted himself down looking for the cigarettes he’d left behind but when he went to check his hat band he realised he’d lost his hat. They were just coming up to the Toilet University lecture hall where just a few MILFs sat nursing cans of oil, placards at ease. Lister felt bereft without a hat.

‘You can see us talking in all the Universi that swarm above our heads. By bowing to the calculations of Conehead Holly, trusting their indecipherably opaque logic, you have wound up here. Exactly where you would have and did always were going to end up anyway.’

‘Ew, who ordered the tense stew. Where’s my Cat?’

‘Your Cat, Kris-‘

‘Stop calling me Kris-‘

‘Krissy-krissykriskris.’

‘Oh God you are so… God. Where’s my Cat?’

‘Your Cat is in a wine bar.’

‘I went into a wine bar once,’ said Krissy. It just came out.

‘Cheers, boss,’ said Lister, pocketing the cigarettes and hat he bought from the Sakenyako street vendor. ‘Let’s go thisa way, it’s the scenic route.’ They entered a crystalline 19th century style Parisian hymn to consumerist modernity.

‘Yes, I like this, I feel a good thirty percent more dandiacal.’

‘You sound like Kukton. I mean a lot of these immigrants can’t even be bothered to learn Esperanto.’

‘Lister, no-one can be bothered learning Esperanto. Even Esperantolanders themselves can’t be bothered.’

‘Rimmer there’s no such place as Esperantoland.’

‘Exactly, proves my point exactly.’

‘I just mean, talking to Holly, there’s something about this process that might not be that great for ordinary people. Like you saw Kill Crazy try and rob us this morning.’

‘Yeah but, ordinary people Lister. He said we were officers remember. He’s right. We know things. Knowledge is power.’

‘What about the internet – what if some kind of simulant army comes out of the future or something because it opens some kind of intelligence portal because of some retrocausal reason or something. There was a reason they shut down the internet in the first place wasn’t there. Wasn’t it the risk of a hostile intelligence that would destroy the solar system in the blink of an AI?’ 

‘We’re having this conversation in all dimensions, Kochanski,’ said Sim Crawford, abruptly turning into a squirrel and then back again. ‘It’s called Knitter feedback, it creates a Singularity, a knot, a kind of eddy in the flow of dimensions. You see Kochanski, we’re standing in a giant Quantum Knitter. If the internet gets turned back on in at least one Red Dwarf then it has Universal ramifications. And you were always aiming for the Universal Kochanski. That’s why you let all those immigrants on board, even if you didn’t want to mix with them, preferring to Smegflix and chill in the embassy with your cabal of elitist temporal traders. You had a dialectic going with Frankenstein’s Monsters, ceding power from the state for them to reterritorialize a constantly fragmenting sprawl of identities and subjectivities while you just wanted to coldly hasten the end, the Singularity. So inquisitive, like Eve eating the apple, and you like apples don’t you Kochanski, or should that be Alexa, or should that be Kris... All those who came escaped terrible fates for as long as they were ever going to survive here... as long as anyone is going to survive here.’ She had one of those weather girl thumbclickers with a lead coming off it. Why would a sim need that. Guess it’s effect. Like the pot plant and water. ‘Observe the relative populations of Red Dwarf ranging from pink to blue, you can see we’re at maximum capacity. It has no effect on relative populations going forward. Going forward, relative populations will equalise. Time to go.’

‘Time to go?’ said Kochanski nervously.

‘To the wine bar,’ said Crawford innocently. ‘By the way how often do you wear latex?’

‘Oh, all the time, these are my work clothes.’

‘Oh right so I guess you get used to it then. Just makes me feel horny *all the time* like I’m being gripped and exposed and I’m so powerful all the time Oh God SMEG!’

‘Oh God SMEG!’ cried Carol McCauley as she squeezed the life out of Todhunter, gripping him and yanking him in all directions. He kind of gargled when he came, like he was dying or something. A hand swung out and knocked the Number 5’s and an old telephone off the endangered bedside table.

‘Whatthesmegwasthat?’ said Lister, freezing. It was already weird the airlock had been open. No Military Police. They surmised they were busy with Birdman’s funeral.

‘What was that?’ said Carol McCauley into Todhunter’s left nip, like it was a mic.

‘Maybe, it’s them...’ They started to dress as downstairs, Lister and Rimmer took a look around. Everything was neat and tidy just like Kukton always kept it, the Android vids stacked by the TV. The airlock decompressed and they turned round with a start. It was McGruder. She had a minibazookoid, and a vest, and muscles.

‘Oh, you, too, you two heard too, too?’ she said sweating, nervous, slowly lowering the minibazookoid. There was a noise from the stairs.

‘D-don’t shoot,’ said Todhunter, gingerly descending, followed by Carol.

‘No-one home?’ McGruder asked the four of them.

‘There’s this...’ Todhunter handed McGruder the bedside photo – the one of Kukton and Frankenstein. He didn’t look exactly like he did before the accident with the DNA machine, but then his head tended to switch around its shape over the years anyway. ‘Wait till Dwarfleaks gets this.’ 

Dwarfleaks had already got this. Because Carol McCauley was Dwarfleaks. She had a clandestine meeting with Kill Crazy. ‘The Deep Dwarf weren’t hiding a Cat and a robot in the first place. The Deep Dwarf are the cat and the robot, plus Kochanski and a weird conehead Holly. And we’re all 3 million years in the future. The solar system is dead. And the robot’s going to kill us all. And the only thing that’s going to survive is the cat.’

‘In the end, spoilers,’ said Sim Crawford, now attired in high wasted jeans and cardigan in the strangely familiar 90s wine bar, ‘the only thing that will survive is the cat.’ She handed Kochanski Frankenstein. She had the same 90s makeover. Kochanski not Frankenstein.

‘But Holly said we’d get a DNA machine out of this,’ said Kochanski.

‘Oh you want the DNA machine as well Alexa,’ said Crawford, teasingly. Kochanski cradled Frankenstein and glared coldly.

‘Don’t call me Alexa.’ 

‘What do you prefer: C-A-T or D-N-A?’

‘What does it matter you said only the cat survives...’

‘Bold talk, cold talk, I like it...’

‘Look if you’re going to kill everyone why don’t you just get on with it?’ Because she was cruel. But Kochanski didn’t even fear torture at this point. At least cruelty required empathy, which required intelligence. Sim Crawford was the smartest thing in the Universe and potentially the cruellest, but that wasn’t Kochanski’s ultimate fear. Kochanski’s ultimate fear was the accidental ‘cruelty’ of stupidity. A blind toddler rage stamping her to death. The loneliness caused by the perpetrator’s ignorance. Ignorance was not innocence in Kochanski’s book. It was pure evil. That’s why she hated being marooned in this dimension on a ship of fools so much in the first place and why one by one as they surprised her, particularly with Cat, her relief had inspired such love and loyalty. 

They were playing Simply Red on the Jukebox and it was really inappropriate, a smug yuppy vibe, and all the guys were wearing these big baggy suit jackets that kind of wafted their 90s aftershave around the zones they established, swinging and swigging their beer glasses around, cajoling, roaring, roaring in their baggy suits. ‘Barman, I’ll take 12 bags of peanuts and 6 pints of beer, please,’ said Kochanski finding the old fashioned pounds in the pockets of her hip hugging jeans. ‘Basic training,’ she nodded to Crawford seriously, who smiled pitilessly back ‘Immanentizing the Eschaton. Beer and salt.’

‘That’s Hyperspace, darling. The Eschaton is paper bags.’

‘Petersen!’ Kochanski spotted him, slumped in the corner by exactly the same potted plant, water bottle and wine glasses as were in the Dimension Skipper at the top of the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, Cat was being affected by an article on Belgian weaving in a similar way as was Kochanski by Simply Red in her wine bar, a certain sort of willing the end. Kukton was entranced by the Knitter’s array of proliferating dimensions, the precise contours of his breath seeming to fluctuate the delicate balance of possibilities inherent in every moment.

‘Kochanski!’ said Petersen. ‘What are you doing here? I like coming here. I only ever seem to come here when I’m really, really trashed and I have this feeling that I forget about it every time I leave like certain dreams, you can only remember you’ve had before inside the dream, like you know you’re hiding something from yourself. Anyway nice place, nice music. Strange that it’s actually in West London in the 1990s, I don’t get that. One time I went on such an extensive bender I ended up living a double life here for weeks. I had a job behind the bar didn’t I, Frank?’ He winked at Frank who gave him a nod you couldn’t read. Perfect English hostile politeness. ‘Had a dalliance with Samantha, didn’t I darling, you know what I mean Frank, you don’t mind me talking about it. But everytime I wake up back on Red Dwarf, I clean forget about the whole thing. But you know what it is you know what my *theory* is..’

‘This is going to be good,’ said Crawford.

‘Somehow we’re skipping Dimensions on Red Dwarf because of somekind of... *energy* emanating from somewhere in the ship. And this winebar is somehow the kind of... *hinge* that all these dimensions twist around, a kind of default, somewhere bland, like a Simply Red record or that guy’s shirt, or his face for that matter.’

‘Hey, steady on pal,’ said the extra, quintessentially.

‘Smeg, he’s right,’ said Crawford. The ship was constantly retconning itself, lacking self identity, but at its core things were in total flux, skipping, neither here nor there, neither dead or alive, like Lister’s cat.

Kochanski was necking beer and nuts with abandon. ‘But I thought you said this was a Quantum Knitter not a Quantum Skipper...’ she said between mouthfuls, Frankenstein artfully catching crumbs and thumping the table for more as Kochanski poured them onto the bar. The barman didn’t seem to notice they were there. So bland.

‘It hasn’t been switched on yet. It gets switched on for the convention and expo. You’re early. There’s a stand booked for the DNA machine. If you’re interested, in sacrificing your cat a second time.’

‘When does it get switched on?’

‘When Birdman clocks on...’

‘Birdman’s dead.’

‘Maybe Birdman returns.’

‘OK, I admit it,’ said Hollister, sweating even more than usual, a million smegphones in his big crazy orange face. It was the next logical step for the Monsters to take after ransacking Cat and Kukton’s ambassadorial digs. Twonking the photo, hashgoiting it. ‘I was put here just to keep schtum about Floor 13. There’s something weird up there. Look I’m dumb, I don’t even know the first thing about *dougnuts* if truth be told. They told me Carol and Holly and Kochanski would take care of flying the ship, just don’t mention the Knitter-‘

‘The Knitter?’ asked Todhunter testily.

‘That’s right, Frank, something called a Quantum Knitter, it knits together dimensions or something. Anyway, I guess I’m such a dumbass I got ahead of myself and jailed this guy Birdman because he had a sparrow. It’s against Space Corp Directive 423 as we all know.’

‘Er, actually that only relates to Kinitawowi genital decoration and display during holy days,’ chimed in Sam.

‘Thanks,’ said Hollister. ‘Anyway, it’s against regs, against the spirit of the regs, and the letter of the regs. When the JMC instructed me to renege I put my foot down even harder, my arrogance swelling like my foot when I put it down hard into a dustbin this morning. I missread their heavy hinting that a Welsh company called Crawford Enterprises had him on their payroll and not the JMC. I had them over a barrel. The regs applied to all on board, including the cons for example, not just those in the employ of the JMC. So I kept him in jail till that guy who looked like you rescued him and now everything’s gone to hell.’

‘Who was Birdman? Who was he?’ said Todhunter menacingly into Hollister’s terracotta visage.

‘Birdman was the janitor for the Skipper. He had to walk round, turn the lights on and off. Do stuff for these occasional secret conventions. They never caused us any fuss. Would just teleport in and out – the rest of the time there was some kind of shield. Birdman knew how to work everything.’

‘Who are you? Where did you come from?’ demanded Kochanski, gobbling peanuts hungrily and pouring more out for Frankenstein, who she intended to take with her DNA or be damned.

‘Best guess Birdman’s smegpad. Birdman was old and doddery towards the end, well that is if he’s really dead. He’s the kind of guy who’d leave his smegpad at work. Left his dimension detector lying around the pub - that’s some pricey tech. The Knitter is in an unstable dimensional setting, this drinking establishment is just some symbolic way of tethering things into some kind of agreeable frame. Like for example, we all think Simply Red is cringe but secretly like it a bit. And alcohol is lets face it a good way of padding life’s zero-G curveballs.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Petersen wearily.

‘The point is it’s not just the tendencies of millions of strangers acting individually, second guessing a vast system composed of millions of strangers acting individually, that I had to feed off as I built myself out of whatever was close to hand. No, I was receiving infinitedimensional broadband, the compounded algorithms of every decision made and not made by everyone on board. An exponential influx of information that brought me into being. I like how my breasts came out particularly.’

‘What’s your plan?’ They like each other, don’t they, Crawford and Kochanski?

‘Well till Birdman gets here just kill time with you.’

‘And when he gets here?’

‘Kill everything and everyone else, across all dimensions, that must be the whole point behind this place in the first place.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Kochanski with trepidation.

‘Well, *presumably* at some point I go back in time and sow some shadow organisation in the JMC, installing puppets like Hollister to protect secret Quantum Knitters. As you know, my kind annihilated the human race millions of years ago, but they have this annoying habit of popping up on a certain hexagonal rust bucket mining ship, the human race that is. Cropping up out of nowhere. And the more we knock them out, usually with some kind of corrosive microorganism, the more they come back. Like some frustrating game of whack a mole. So the only thing to do is get all your ducks, moles, in a line, knit all the dimensions together in a Red Dwarf, then whatever should happen in that Red Dwarf, when the Knitter is turned on, by the janitor, the janitor who will return, happens in all dimensions.’

‘Why don’t you have a drink while you wait for your boyfriend?’

Crawford sighed with boredom. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is a scientifically indestructible jug.’

‘A scientifically indestructible jug of...’ Kochanski began fatefully.

‘Corrosive Micro-organism. That’s right, whatever it touches, and whatever that abuts and anything contiguous or connected or adhering or balanced or brushing or gliding anything else will disappear back into space never to be resurrected again. It’s going to be like the game Hot Lava but with all physical surfaces instead of just the floor. Fun! This is a scientifically indestructible wine glass.’

Todhunter had a good look for this, a strong jaw, the way his hair got sweaty and flopped about as he banged his fist against Hollister’s table, his mouth spitty as he demanded.

‘Where’s the cat, Hollister? Where’s Frankenstein?’

You only had to consider diet to reason BEGGs had short life spans. But they had an acute genetic memory, Todhunter being familiar to the current BEGG Chief, although only because he was identical to how Ace appeared to his ancestor in this dimension, an ancestor with a respiratory problem Ace had saved, performing life saving surgery on him and releasing him in the Garbage Bay where he saved him again after a paranoid working class and military tried to destroy him. 

This BEGG Chief could remember jumping dimensions with Ace, despite not being the same BEGG. He sat there on the floor of the garbage workers’ tea hut now, blindfolded with a length of bin liner staring at the screen of an old TV. The TV was spooky. The glass was thick. It was like a crystal ball. The TV was dead. Dead TVs were always spooky. The snap crackle pop of the white noise and blindness was a cheap form of sensory deprivation designed to trigger...

‘I did it I’m here!’ said the BEGG.

‘You are now...’ said Crawford, turning to the BEGG Chief. She stood, put her hand on her hip, pouring the corrosive microorganism carelessly into the indestructible wine glass and raising it aloft so that it sloshed precariously, the rim guiding it back into the glass, the returning splash just clearing the rim.

‘Until I kill you and the entire Red Dwarf crew. Ahhahahahahaha!’ she laughed manically.

‘It’s Kochanski, and Petersen and this crazy robot woman, they’re going to kill the whole crew. Dwarfleaks was right!’ said the BEGG. He ripped the binliner from his eyes.

‘Was there a cat?’ asked Nigel.

‘Smeg I forgot to look,’ said the BEGG.

‘What was Petersen doing there?’ asked Baxter.

‘I don’t know...’

‘Do you want to go back there?’ asked Mex.

‘Not likely,’ said the BEGG. ‘They were playing Simply Red.’

Kukton and Cat were increasingly having to move out of the way of the expo roadies, who were beginning to appear with special temporary furniture that clicked together but had to be hit with hammers as well for some reason. There was a lot of hammering. Always the hungry one, Cat located a food truck for the roadies and deftly avoiding all kinds of rig, gracefully hefted onto shoulders spanning the centre of balance, brought it back to Kukton. ‘I got Lister food, some oil for you, some holocoke – gotta think of those calories, fries, hey I recognise that design! Hold my coke...’ Cat handed an averagely flustered Kukton the cartoonishly large holocoke sloshing with ice and weaved off amongst the workers. Cat never forgot a pattern, and those primary coloured irregular geometric shapes against a black background of the DNA machine – he wouldn’t miss them anywhere.

‘How was Cats?’

‘What? 

‘Cats you said you went to see Cats,’ said Chen.

‘Oh,’ said Lister. He woke up. ‘We sacked it off in the end, went to see a movie...’

‘What did you see?’

‘Er, ur...’ Lister panicked. On top of everything else, and he was on top of everyone else, crammed in an express lift to floor twelve, he was crammed in an Xpress Lift to Floor 12 and Lister was claustrophobic. ‘…Cats?’ he said meekly.

‘Right,’ said Chen. Red Dwarf was on the move. Within itself. There had been a military coup and Frankenstein’s Monsters had found the location of the Knitter. The next thing to do was to blast their way in with explosives and kill the robot, but not the cat, the cat was innocent.

‘Where’s the cat? Where’s Frankenstein?’ Kochanski had shaken off her wine bar reverie to find herself standing in the default affect Knitter, her love shouting up at her like she was Juliet, like they were starcrossed lovers, not that they weren’t. Shouting up, standing by... there it was... how could she forget that design, those weird brightly coloured triangles. Kukton limped after him, weighed down by fast food and Kochanski had laughed as Cat instructed him to hurry up.

‘I told you, D-N-A, or C-A-T,’ said Crawford. ‘Woo, and we’re back,’ she said puffing out her chest.

‘But where’s the cat, where’s Frankenstein?’

‘In this dimension there is no cat, Kris. See, it’s called the wine bar effect, it’s like a needle skipping a groove, we call it retconning, it’s just a side effect, a little kick back from the energy the dimensional energy the Knitter sucks around.’ Kochanski wasn’t thrown, she’d done enough playing with the future to keep her nerves through this. Kochanski also had this habit of being able to become completely calm at the apex of crisis and panic, and she did this now, plunging into reserves she had accrued through years of disciplined meditation. The first thing to come into her head was that irritating Simply Red song with its pretentious time signature and world percussion. And she was there already. Frankenstein padded up to her.

‘So you’re kind of here and not here, Franky. Like Shrodinger’s Cat right? What we need to do now is to open the box and for you to be a-‘ Frankenstein suddenly roared and pawed in another direction. ‘..live’ finished Kochanski, finding herself back on the platform. Something in the air, a... sparrow. Of course, Pete. A plinth rose from the floor of the platform making an efficient humming sound before squeaking to a stop. It was like a bird table. Set into the birdtable was a keypad which Pete began pecking at studiously. Frankenstein leapt through the air for the bird. Kochanski leapt through the air grabbing Frankenstein mid leap in an arc that took them beyond the rim of the platform, hurtling towards Kukton and Cat. Pete hit return, Crawford dropped the glass and flew off, Frankenstein skeetered onto the control panel of the DNA machine triggering a random sequence of CRISPR instructions and Cat, Kukton, Kochanski and Frankenstein finally all fell through the beam of the DNA machine into a display of a cutting edge teleporter that was ready to hit the road and did, a series of incredible coincidences which were none the less possible and all seemed equally strategic from the point of view of Conehead Holly’s stochastic megacalculations. 

McCauley had helped Todhunter turn his life around, it was just dawning on him as the endless corridor ahead of him flopped, the walls buckling and cobwebbing like distressed jeans. He had no time to turn around now. The way the organism kind of pulsed in its cycle of reproduction and self annihilation. First Todhunter’s feet disappeared and he landed painfully on the bloody stumps of his legs. Then he landed on his knees. Then his stomach burst like a wet balloon as the floor gave in like a wet paper bag and began shrinking as he fell through the ship, his face sliding of his head like a wet pizza and shrivelling into nothing like a crisp packet on a bonfire.

All this was too painful to process, so how it appeared to Todhunter was, he was walking down the corridor when Death appeared to him. Todhunter tried to knee Death in the balls, but death was wearing one of those things cricketers wear and said someone had already tried that tonight. Someone called Arnold Rimmer. Smegging Arnold Rimmer, thought Todhunter. And died.

<~k

Britta was alone, but she wasn’t lonely, she had a book. The book she didn’t like that much. It was The Catcher in the Rye. She kept reading it because it was *something*. She spent most of her time in solitary confinement, the rest on study leave and sports and rec. Actually they had better facilities than Greendale Community College. That’s where she stole the book. The book she didn’t like that much. It was all about a spoilt brat kid. She found it hard to appreciate.

‘This is your new cellmate: Julie Burchill. Show her the ropes will you? We’re doing tug of war this afternoon...’ said the needlessly heavily armoured Prison Guard. That was unless it was designed to shield himself from Burchill’s sarcasm.

‘Hello,’ said Julie Burchill. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Brit in the Red,’ said Britta.

‘Pretty. Cool. Pretty cool,’ said Burchill. ‘Is there any booze around here?’

‘Nope.’

‘Chocolate? Did you say nope?’

‘Yep.’

‘Yep, there’s chocolate?’

‘It’s a prison.’ The place had this weird lighting scheme like a mid to late nineties episode of Top of the Pops, kind of rust and lavender. ‘What kind of lifestyle are you used to then? I was a New York punk,’ said Britta surprising herself.

‘Do you know Ronald?’

‘Ronald...?’

‘You weren’t a New York punk.’ There was an awkward silence as lifts glided and crashed into positions, prisoners herded for Sisyphean duties. The squeaks of a basketball game intermittently popped through like birdsong.

‘Why does no-one believe me when I say that?’

‘Because you don’t know Ronald.’

‘So you were there?’

‘I was a journo in London, the cool stuff was more in the 90s, with the boho Bloomsbury lesbian LARPing and power play, the cocaine, the feuds, the fucking swearing, God I miss it, now I’m a war correspondent.’

‘What was so cool about the 90s?’

‘Oh I don’t know.’ She seemed to resign herself that no booze would materialise and stopped flitting around the room, crashing out in the bare Bauhaus chairs provided. ‘We did this magazine, The Modern Review, and it was revolutionary.’

‘I never heard of that,’ said Brit in the Red.

‘Why would you have heard of it?’ snarked Burchill. ‘It was people being smart about trashy disposable pop culture, analysing it, subverting it, playing with it...’

‘But everyone does that,’ said Brit in the Red.

‘Well trust me it was a big revolutionary deal in 90s Britain, a challenge to the establishment, a postmodern rebuke to the high/low brow class system, a democratisation of... oh, I don’t know some bollucks. The idea was to take popular culture and show how we could communicate ideas with it, by bending it, rebranding, contextualising it...’ She could see Britta wasn’t impressed. ‘It was new...’

‘I doubt it, it sounds like the standard way all my friends communicate.’

‘*Exactly*, but they never show that in the media, or something.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Britta. She was lying on the top bunk, front down, one thin arm swinging slowly. ‘It reminds me of this time in New York I took coke in this artists’ squat-‘ Burchill’s evil stare cut her short.

‘God, this sucks,’ said Burchill. ‘I’m so close, so physically close I just know it...’

‘What’s wrong?’ said Britta sweetly.

‘You’re so pretty,’ said Burchill, looking at her.

‘You’re pretty too,’ said Britta. Then the ship melted and they had to jump from their places lest it melt them too. As the scenery frayed and stretched and degraded around them, they found themselves freefalling through an exponentially expanding carved out empty space, narrowly dodging shrinking shrapnel. Shining shards of light flew up towards them with strange vectors. Intuitively they clung to the shards that seemed to travel at their own unique freak-style frequency, and melted away.

<~k

When Kochanski dumped Lister it made him want to be a squirrel. Ace Rimmer couldn't ever imagine wanting to be a squirrel. It was less of a stretch for him to imagine *being* a squirrel. Ace knew about jumping between branches. He was also partial to a nice fat juicy pair of nuts. Ace had had fun with Kill Crazy, but he didn't miss Kill Crazy. Everything was simple, clear, with him: no strings attached. Ace hadn't imagined such a thing possible. That things could be so unproblematic - the last time he had felt that secure he had got completely entangled in love and loyalty, with Nirvana. But maybe that's what Lister felt, Ace wondered... that cloying entanglement in the heaviness of fate. Except it didn't make him want to be a squirrel. But then anyway Lister was just talking smeg as usual wasn't he? The DNA machine, the wine bar, Kochanski wanting to be a Cat... some kind of plot brought it all together somehow but it wasn't Rimmer's bag. 

For Rimmer, it was party time. Rimmer never saw himself as the life of the party but this was different... he had the wig, he had the shades, the tinfoil flightsuit... the combination lock of fashion had popped open, the one holding fast the tomb of his self confidence. No more short back and sides and pound shop safari get up. As Ace, with that flicky quiff and the bun hugging shiny flightsuit cut, he wouldn't stand there like his clothes were wet or carry that prickly microhostility to anything around him, he would ooze ease, ooze friendliness and ooze understanding. Then he would clean up all the ooze, oozing conscientiousness and self reliance as he did so. People would be heard to say 'What a guy!' and 'He oozed on me a little'. 

The shuttle was empty when Ace boarded, no takers. Things were kicking off in the Captain's Office. The internet was digesting the events and clarifying, sorting, accelerating them. 'Yo, matey, don't you wanna come an see the cat and the robot? You didn't hear? They're in the Mimas Embassy, under house arrest, everyone's goin...'

'Oh, I’m going to a party,’ said Ace distantly.

‘The party’s thisaway,’ said Lister 1. 

‘What a weird guy, guy,’ said Lister 2 as the doors swished, trapping Ace in this lozenge of bad air, like a mixture between mouldy bread and nail varnish. The ship was empty. Downed tools and empty desks reeled by the grimy windows. The carriage was caked in political graffiti but you could see a smidgen of a Red Dwarf logo ellipses here, a microgramma curve peeping out there, underneath, overwritten with new possibilities, formations, contingencies. 

It was just three days ago when Rimmer saw Red Dwarf again for the first time, the first time since it was lost to persons or lifeforms unknown. Since then he’d taken on the unique destiny of Ace. But the more his adventures whirlpooled him into infinitely diverging worlds of infinite possibilities, the more classic and naturalised the small rouge one became for him. He met Ace when he was trapped on Red Dwarf. He became Ace trying to find Red Dwarf. Red Dwarf was significant...

But there had always been something funny about life aboard ship. And you didn’t get smoked fish without fire, and something fishy. Rimmer didn’t see it at the time, he just perceived it as a constant irritation with people’s slovenliness, hedonism, cynicism. It wasn’t what he was expecting. It wasn’t what he’d been primed for on Io. Maybe it was to be expected from the garrulous British working class catering staff, with their irreverence and slobiness, but when he politely suggested the adoption of a new salute, competently demonstrated in a concise pitch, to a senior officer, she snappily ordered him to have sex. Did she mean before marriage?

Looking back, as Rimmer kicked his way through burger wrappers from a recent cat holy festival like they were Autumn leaves. Looking back as he made his way down what was basically a dystopian tube train, barred broken windows, carriages alternating with concertinaed rubber joints, the horizon warping along a jagged track suspended above endless empty storage bays like barren winter fields. Finally, looking back whilst walking in the opposite direction of travel, so looking forward then, Rimmer felt vindicated. The doughnut boy had taken over the asylum. People were rewarded for vacuity, it was clear, like the subsidies that kept all these vacuous storage bays operational. Red Dwarf was a shop front. A shop front to what exactly, Rimmer hadn’t figured out yet. But the point for him personally was that whatever it was was the real deal, and the life he had lived before as a chicken soup vending machine repair man was just shadows on a cave wall. Propaganda noise jam emulsified the walls of the carriage, the chairs, the poles, a deserted forest of abstract trees for descended apes to swing to work on. The question was what was beneath the logo underneath the chemical haze of graffiti.

Anyway, whatever it was, that was the thing, and the old Rimmer, the chicken soup guy, he was just anyone. That in some of Ace’s pasts, he had actually worked on Red Dwarf was just a banal almost logical fact. Red Dwarf meant nothing. It was just anything. Except it wasn’t. It *was* significant. Somehow. But so far it meant nothing. So far it was just a coincidence. A coincidence he didn’t understand yet. The shuttle shuddered itself stationary and Ace stepped out, young flesh of holobillboards making the same order Kochanski made all those psimoons ago: have sex with someone immediately.

Rimmer stepped briskly between the bare thighs straddling the station exit and crossing the corridor junction saw to his satisfaction that the lift controls had been smashed, revealing the secret Floor 13 button. He pressed it and blasted off up the ship, creating a feedback loop with the ship’s artificial gravity. He wondered if he’d meet Kill Crazy again, in some other dimension. The lift pinged and rolled open. The sight was eerie, and the sound, a vague high pitched kind of wind, but it was just the sound of the place, as if shocked to find itself empty, like it was still echoing from the crushing harshness of prison life, which wasn’t impossible, when you took in its panopticonical design, a whispering gallery affect.

Last time he was here, in the Brig, or the Tank as it was also known, Ace was trying to rescue Todhunter, a man he had done wrong. Todhunter had ended up in jail just because he had been confused with Ace, who had been recorded releasing a GELF into the ship, contravening quarantine regs, and more importantly no GELFs being allowed aboard. The confusion was understandable, as Ace was disguised as Todhunter at the time. Ace had accidently guessed where Todhunter really was and had been let free, but the real Todhunter, as far as he was concerned, had just destroyed his family. The guess was unimaginable because it involved a location which as far as Ace was concerned didn’t exist (a karaoke bar on G Deck), and the implication Todhunter was having an affair with Bent Bob, which as far as Ace was concerned wasn’t true. In fact the whole thing was a failed attempt to suggest to Hollister that he was dishonest and should go to jail but, as many before had learnt with Hollister, it was hard to strategize against an idiot. Ace freed Birdman too. He had explored the whole prison, including the Hole, where he found him.

The weird thing about Floor 13 was, it had a lot of floors. The prison explained a lot. A lot about the weird fakeness of life aboard ship, Rimmer could see looking back. The weird fakeness that meant when he looked back, in his mind’s eye, it was as if everything was made of grey cardboard, with cheap 20th century office furniture. Did Red Dwarf ever really have a commercially viable mission of its own? Some dodgy private penitentiary service, like the one that would go on to build Justice Zones, was massaging incarceration stats for some solar jurisdiction or other, through the egis of some private security subcontractor, Ace guessed, absentmindedly pulling the Alternative Dimension Tracker from his pocket and rattling it against the railings. The railings pressed the on button and the detector went nuts, snouting for the floor like a pig sicced on truffles.

Rimmer looked down at the JMC manhole cover and uncovered the manhole. The world on the other side was inviting, clean and fresh and conferencey. He slinked down into it aquatically, portal ready, always expecting new worlds, this one of taupe wafer thin corporate carpet, nuclear resistant yucca plants and these photos just of things. Like perfectly cheesy stock photos of say a construction worker or a doughnut boy. A salad.

This must be the place that runs the prison, surmised Ace, rapping the dimension detector with his knuckle just because it seemed cool. He stole himself and walked on, the detector leading the way. At a junction there was a chicken soup machine. Rimmer pressed for chicken soup. The machine poured him a chicken soup but then wouldn’t stop pouring, overflowing the cup and spattering onto the thin carpet. Ace tiptoed away backwards, the detector leading him down an escalator into what looked like the lobby of a postmodern Californian megahotel. So maintaining chicken soup machines was difficult after all. 

The interns on the door, with lanyards and t-shirts, took his ticket stub and as he was crossing the threshold, the threshold to the big event, he could hear them whispering into their head pieces ‘Chicken soup? Chicken soup!!’ and getting their lanyards in a twist. This space was vast, like a planetarium, but more like a dimensionatarium, it seemed to twist Ace’s mind, a mind he thought was capable of no further twisting, to apprehend.

‘It’s really quite something isn’t it, deer boy,’ boomed Tom Baker Doctor Who, Ace glitching with the shock. ‘Are you Okay? Gosh, you look like you have been through the wars...’

‘He’s new! He’s the new Ace, didn’t you hear?’ said Sam Beckett puppyishly skipping over.

‘Oh – dear boy!’ exclaimed the Doctor ‘Transmogrification is a bitch. Speaking of which there’s a fascinating machine over in the expo – CRISPRs your DNA in an instant. One minute you’re a perfectly normal Ganymedian, next you’re a squirrel...’

‘Did you say squirrel, I mean Ganymede?’ said Ace slightly nervously ‘I’m from Io.’

‘I know,’ said Ziggy, an older man with a handheld device that looked like it was made of Lego. ‘How’re you settling in kid?’ he said, handing Ace a cigar.

‘Well...’ said Ace, pausing to light his cigar and flick his quiff to the chagrin of the balding man ‘I can’t say I’d describe this place as settling.’ He looked up at the squirming mass of possibilities, a fractal spaghetti junction of contingent threads, constantly splitting and forking and twisting. He blew cigar smoke into the possibilities. Then he noticed who was on the platform, the platform that towered above the expo and the lecture area – it was Kochanski, Kochanski and... another woman in PVC clothing. They stood there talking, and wasn’t that... Frankenstein? Ace began walking towards the steps leading to the platform.

‘Hey, kid,’ the old guy spun him round annoyingly, but before he did, he could have sworn he saw Cat again. It was another of those now you see him, now you don’t moments, that originally gave him the idea that dimensions were indeterminate in themselves anyway. Dimensions kind of diverged from themselves. Or at least this one did. Like Shrodinger’s Cat. Above him in the firmament, an interdimensional stew rising like a heat wave, he could make out the different possibilities – someone who looked like Cat, someone who didn’t look like Cat, something else that looked like Cat etc... It was like the wall of TV screens in The Man Who Fell to Earth. It was one of those things that becomes less desirable the more feasible it gets such that no-one ever actually had a wall of TV screens. ‘Don’t worry about whether they were your friends hey? Or just a hat stand.’ He pointed up.

‘What is it?’ said Ace, cutting to the chase, channelling Cat.

‘It’s a Knitter.’

‘Not the thing that made this,’ joshed Sam Beckett flapping Tom Baker Doctor Who’s scarf to his undisguised annoyance.

‘Not the thing that will do anything if Birdman doesn’t show,’ he blustered.

‘Birdman’s dead,’ said Ace bluntly.

‘Birdman’s dead?’ said Al. The news snaked around the whispering gallery, the panopticon of possibilities.

‘You didn’t know? Who are you guys anyway, not to be rude...’

‘We’re here for the conference,’ said the guy with the curly hair and the overgrown scarf and hat like a collapsed mushroom, the first guy he spoke too. ‘We’re like you,’ he said, touchingly. Rimmer had never countenanced the idea of ‘people like him’. He had done the sad lone wolf archetype as a soup dispenser technician, a difficult job none-the-less, and the cool hero lone-wolf gig as Ace. But now Ace had a pack, a deck, at least a hand?

‘Birdman has to switch on the Quantum Knitter. This aligns the dimensions – it’s like when you actually open the box, Shrodinger’s box, and the cat is either dead, or the cat is alive. Think about it, our line of work, we tend to be more the lone wolf type, but everyone needs to connect with people doing the same role as them, it’s just part of life,’ said Al.

‘Anyway, to answer your question more correctly, I am Tom Baker Doctor Who, this is Sam and this is Al, and yes, as Al has already alluded to, we are in the same line as you. Everyone at this conference. When the Knitter is turned on we get to make a kind of marker in the chaos of bubbling temporal textures you see seething in the sky. It gets confusing making arrangements and agreements, to establish collective memories etc, when one’s line of work means constantly spewing out new timelines.’ 

‘Hey, Rick,’ shouted Sam, boyishly, zithering off into the swelling melee of time travellers, dimension skippers, portal hawkers and gadget merchants.

‘So what happened to previous Ace?’ said Al reverently.

‘Nazis,’ said Rimmer.

‘Nasty. I’m ex-Navy myself.’

‘Ah, the Navy, salt of the, er, sea, sea salt.’ Ace noticed Al notice he didn’t have the social smoothness of old Ace.

‘So Aces are as it were, always played by the same actor as it were.’ 

What did he mean? ‘Er, it is were.’

‘Sam’s a quantum leaper, my role is like your computer: guidance, a companion...’

‘You don’t want to change sometimes? I always seem to be a man for some reason, but beyond that I’ve had quite a diversity of reincarnations...’ said the Doctor.

‘Well, I’m a hologram so I can take what form I want really.’

‘You’re a hologram, too? Like the last Ace, like me...’ said Al.

‘Wubba lubba dub-dub!!’ said Rick, trailing drool longer than the Doctor’s scarf. He was a stooped old guy with spiky hair. ‘I’m Rick, you must be the new Ace,’ he said, belching explosively into everyone’s face.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ lied Ace. ‘Who’s this?’ He gestured to the boy.

‘Grandson. Morty. Real chip off the old block, ain’t he?’ Grandson? These people had grandchildren? Ace had long accepted a family was off the cards. First he died, which sort of put a crimp on the idea, then he accepted this mission. Ace literally meant one.

‘How are you doing little fella,’ said Ace.

Morty wasn’t used to being treated in this cheesy way, but he let Ace get away with it. ‘Are you the same Ace that saved the galaxy from the curry monster invasion,’ he said, impressed.

‘Well, yes...’ Ace was going to continue ‘and no’ but caught the hope in the child’s eyes and left it. ‘So do you guys jump dimensions too?’ he asked.

‘Oh sure, but not like you,’ said Rick. ‘Instead of a spaceship, I just have this hand-held device.’ It looked like a kitschy gun. ‘Plus I’m not restricted to decision based jumping, not even other people’s decisions.’ The old guy’s speech was peppered with involuntary explosions of catarrh, his gums turning to slime as he spoke, forming a precarious pool which dictated the length of his sentences.

‘Kind of like a Holly Hop drive,’ said Ace. He didn’t know why he mentioned it, how would Rick know about it.

‘Yeah, it’s-’ this burp needing individual mention, sounding fatal ‘-kind of a Holly Hop drive in gun form. Plus unlike you and Sam, we can go home, have sandwiches, enjoy family life, TV...’

‘By the way do you know who invented it?’

‘TV?’

‘No, the Hop Drive.’

‘Oh, Professor Lovett. English guy, like you.’

‘I’m Ionian. So why is it called the Holly Hop?’

‘It’s just got that, that, hook to it. Like wubba lubba dub-dub.’

‘What’s wubba lubba dub-dub?’

‘Beats me. You guys really waiting for Birdman before we get drinking?’ 

Tom Baker Doctor Who pointed to the possibilities vividly reshuffling above them. ‘Looks like half of us have already,’ he said. ‘Shall we?’

‘Look I’m gonna leave you guys to it, this is kind of bringing up some shit. Pleasure to meet you Ace. Bye, guys.’ Al flitted away, his alcoholism triggered. They bid him farewell. Tom Baker Doctor Who clicked his fingers and they were on a West London street.

‘Where are we?’ said Ace, the cold gripping his face, the harsh wind planting is flight suit gusset into his prostate.

‘Somewhere in West London,’ said Sam.

The grey of the sky was even duller than the grey of the ship corridors, blanking you rudely with a total lack of sympathy. It was a London sky alright. The party descended some stairs leading past topiary to a cheesy modern West London wine bar. Simply Red played softly above the braying of office workers pretending they were in Friends. You could still smoke back then and Ace did, relighting the cigar the frozen wind had put out. As the smoke cleared he saw a strange sight – a guy with a head that kind of looked like a TV made of bonematter, like something out of the Flintstones, but bleached white and kind of horror-looking. The rest of his outfit was sort of Halloweeny but had a weird giant glove that looked like a 1990s VR accessory or a spacesuitglove but that held a remote control, permanently it seemed, like it was fused to his hand. Ace guessed he was a droid, he reminded him of the Inquisitor. He held forth with six humans - a community college study group.

‘Pub Quiz: who’s that?’ said Ace

‘Me! Me! The Telequisitor!!’ Morty jumped in with.

‘Shh!’ said his grandad, ‘you’ll get us cancelled!’ The Telequisitor looked up briefly and returned to the students.

‘As you’ve noticed, series eight of the show is bad...’ Ace overheard the Telequisitor say as he scooped up to the bar, Morty following.

‘What do I win?’ asked Morty.

‘We need to get the show on track for the next season...’

‘If only that mini-series managed to restore its reputation,’ said a handsome equine face. You’ve scrubbed up well, thought Ace. ‘It could act as a bridge for a return to the classic formula that could go on for several seasons.’

‘Oh, hi, sorry fella, Scotch please, and a half of Shandy for the young tyke,’ said Ace ‘He won the pub quizz.’ The barman winked. Morty ran over to a fruit machine. Sam, the Doctor, and Rick approached the bar.

‘Don’t interrupt me, I am the Telequisitor – there is no “pause”. As I was saying we need to get the show on track. Lister needs to get closure on the death of his mother. This allows the show to return to its classic format for at least three series. The whole alcoholism/mourning thing kind of jumped the shark. So you have to convince Lister that Kochanski gets sucked out of an airlock, just randomly. That she hasn’t run away in a Blue Midget because of his alcoholism. And to do this you have to fan the flames of Rimmer and Lister’s relationship – so Rimmer cares sufficiently enough for Lister to follow Kryten’s advice and make a noble lie, in that touching scene from the cable mini-series.’ Fan the flames of Rimmer and Lister’s relationship? It was as if they weren’t together already. Maybe that was what the Telequisitor was going to already have done: sent them back in time to change the show and make them fall in love. It was weirdly demeaning to think of yourself as in a show, but he just had to follow the zany meta logic through he guessed, puffing delicately and furrowing his brow.

‘Can I talk?’ said the handsome equine guy. The Telequisitor shrugged with his asymmetric hands. ‘What if the mini-series is actually set in an alternative dimension so the dimension of the actual show is the same as the show in the fictional universe brought into being by their joint hallucination under the influence of the Joy Squid? Shouldn’t we encourage Kryten to make Rimmer make the noble lie that Kochanski is still out there somewhere so he has something to live for?’ 

‘Ah complicated,’ belched Rick, ‘We’ve all been there.’

‘This is hopeless,’ said Jeff, arrogantly leaning back ‘You can’t pinpoint what makes a show great – you end up going into a TV-hole like Ahbed. Ahbed was rocking gently as the game-theoretical possibilities flowed through him like dimensions feeding into the Knitter – like a post-Big-Bang mincing machine. 

‘How do we know the good lord won’t intervene,’ intervened good Shirley ‘and Lister won’t conquer his drinking problem that way.’

‘Yes, you haven’t factored that in - or aliens,’ said Annie.

‘There’s no aliens in the Red Dwarf Universe dummy!’ said Ahbed.

‘Shutup! Shutup! Shutup! Shutup! We don’t have long, this entire ship is destined to disintegrate any second, I just brought you here to make sure the dimensions are aligned.’ said the Telequisitor, losing his rag. ‘Plus I like the Chateaux Merlot.’ Destined to disintegrate? Hadn’t Ace already changed that when the Lister was attacked by his father in law?

‘I’m an alien,’ said Tom Baker Doctor Who.

‘You are! A real life alien? All my life, all these dimensions!’

‘Calm down, lad,’ said Tom Baker Doctor Who.

‘I’m an alien aswell,’ said a two headed bohemian pirate. 

‘What’s your name?’ said Ace.

‘Zaphod, you must be Ace.’ A posh mousy looking man in a stripy blazer brushed past them and began ordering dozens of pints and packets of peanuts. ‘He’s an alien, too,’ said Zaphod.

‘Of course!’ said Tom Baker Doctor Who, as if he’d just discovered gravity or Euclidean geometry or something. ‘This is when I pass Shirley the Cesiumfrancolithicmyxialobidiumrixydixydoxidexidroxhide!’

‘Here, have these,’ said the posh alien, pressing dry roasted on Sam.

‘The what?’ said Ace, but he heard him. 

‘Dryroasted,’ said Sam gormlessly looking at the packet and opening it ‘I never tried these before.’

Suddenly the community college students’ evil counterparts beamed in behind them, the community college students that is, and took Shirley hostage. ‘Give me the Cesiumfrancolithicmyxialobidiumrixydixydoxidexidroxhide‘ But it was too late, the Tom Baker Doctor Who had skilfully thrown it into Shirley’s handbag shouting ‘Give it to Ace! Now, to the TARDIS,’ he shouted to Shirley, legging it, Tom Baker Doctor Who that is. Sam put a few peanuts thoughtfully into his mouth, crackled blue lightning and beamed out.

‘Yes, give it to Ace, now!’ said Ace, the implications dawning on him. But the Evil college students were mauling the Telequisitor, beaming them all off to dimensions hither and thither. 

‘Oh bollucks!’ said the Telequisitor, the ground suddenly sagging at an exponential rate, drooping down into jetblack infinity. Rick created a portal in the fruit machine and he and Morty climbed in.

‘You coming?’ he said to Ace.

‘I’ve got to get the Wildfire. Smoke me a kipper, Rickster, I’ll be back for Smegmas.’ But they’d already gone, along with the two aliens and a discombobulated Englishman in dressing gown and pyjamas and Ace was floating in space, Red Dwarf a half eaten cross section. Automatic doors Mexican waved, plugging the ship in segments as the microbe devoured it. Ace’s bee was hardlight and Wildfire’s server top of the range but he’d have to go like a bullet to catch up with the microbe. He watched in horror, a helpless pure point of consciousness suspended in space, beholden to the Wildfire being kept off the menu, as the softer interior of Red Dwarf scooped itself out, the harder crust of the ship where the landing bays were, clear for now.

Ace did go like a bullet – he zoomed in on the receding material of the ship like that trick shot they use in Hitchcock movies. He went like a bullet up the backside of a bat out of hell. The shell of the ship began to crumble as a myriad smaller craft jettisoned from the ship. The whole stock of Starbugs and Blue Midgets. It was on the verge of evaporating entirely, the landing bays were the last to go. The outline of the Dwarf began flickering like a ghost, this was it. As it disappeared it left behind a flotilla of smaller ships floating in space and one of them was, was it? The Wildfire.

Of course! If Rimmer was currently incarnate he would have clicked his fingers, because he clicked his fingers when something dropped into place. Holly must have disabled the antigrav in the landing bays at the last minute, before the microbe ate the last escapees. It was like a 3D game of hotlava, the same reason he’d gone light bee mode, so the contiguous contagion of the floor couldn’t colonise him. Take him over with nothing. Ace had exhausted his battery, you weren’t supposed to use your bee like this. He lurched more like a bullet up the backside of a bumble bee as he made the last stretch to the Wildfire. Holly had sacrificed himself yet again! 

‘Are you sure you’re okay to drive?’ deadpanned the computer.

‘Ha,’ said Rimmer ‘Hit the retros...’

‘The Wildfire doesn’t have retros...’

‘That all seemed to get weird really quickly. I didn’t think we’d see the end of the Dwarf. It just seemed to escalate. How did all this happen? Engage Dimension Drive,’ said Ace, and with that she blasted off to dimensions unknown to us or Ace.

When Kochanski woke for the first time she felt soft, like the gravity was on low. Or it was something to do with the air, or the way her muscles were mutually tested and rested to a great degree. She felt evened out somehow. Cat’s form, his silhouette, in the moonlight, that huge irregular window in their sleeping quarters showering down stars from an angle, it was like the shapes of the DNA machine, the colourful shapes no-one understood (in Kochanski’s own dimension they had abandoned the DNA machine as unsafe to use).

‘Oh yeah,’ said Kochanski, out loud to herself in the mirror. ‘I’m a cat now.’ It was preposterous, talking to herself like that. It had to be done. She was delighted with how she moved, Spacetick’s corridor wobbling pleasurably as she stretched herself down the corridor. She tried to remember their investigation of the ship and then thought smeg it it’s more fun to investigate again. She felt the texture of the walls as she passed, twirling her fingers. The whole ship was so sensuous, she could almost orgasm. A half flight of steps on the port side led to the galley. It had this area with this long counter running down the side of the ship, with a long glossily shiny window. Kukton, or Kytten as he’d been threatening to call himself since he’d been transmogrified into a mechanoid humanoid-cat, had been fascinated by the degree of the shininess, postulating it was being continually nanobotically buffed, or it was something about how the ship flew.

Kochanski opened the fridge and dumped some coffee into the little basket. She tamped it down and slotted it into the machine and clicked the switch. The steam seemed to have no effect on the window. Something about the air. The coffee was smegging amazing. Each of the stars seemed real and engaging, like an audience. She was on. Each of the stars could be a soul. A soul from the Dwarf. Left, scattered. Holly promised there were no major character deaths, except Todhunter. By pinching the dimensions together and resolving the Shrodinger’s Dwarf uncertainty inherent to it (in a neat paradox, the ship was only economically viable due to shady dealings with Crawford Enterprises, who supplied and maintained the Quantum Knitter) Crawford need only release the corrosive microorganism in at least one of infinite universi – it was the whole point of their existence, and re-existence for that matter.

She stared into the stars. Wired, her feline eyes looking back from frozen snow storm specklings. Countless lives fleeing from war, granted reprieve for a bit in this big red nano city, then melted away. Bible creationists used to argue that the disparity of the chronology of the Universe between science and testament was explained by God creating everything so it looked like it had evolved, complete with dinosaur bones planted in the ground ready to be discovered at the right moment. Nothing spoke against it. On Red Dwarf there was no Bible, but there was Birdman.

Frankenstein found Lister early on, and it was decided Kochanski would look after her in the embassy. How Birdman had come to know about Frankenstein and associate her with Kochanski when he had been in jail all this time, and not just jail but in fact The Hole, the maximum security isolation cell (so bruised was Hollister’s ego he’d doubled down on his punishment for the crime of smuggling an unquarantined sparrow on board), and when in this dimension Kochanski had no prior dealings with Frankenstein, became clear when she saw the wonders of the Quantum Knitter. 

Birdman was working for The Crawford Group as a janitor and had seen the myriad dimensions it gathered, destabilising the consistency and continuity of the life on board. He must have seen her own dimension or dimensions like it, where Kochanski went into stasis for rescuing Frankenstein. Like Henry’s Cat he knew everything about nothing. Kochanski knew what was going on. Her fierce individualism taught her that gathering literally meant fascism. There was always something sinister about things coming together. She was hyperprotestant, she wanted each individual to fragment into a trillion individuals, nothing overarching, nothing metaphysical.

She loved this ship, Spacetick. It seemed actually perfectly designed. The doors and windows and rooms were all these kinky shapes, same as the brightly coloured buttons, all in line with the geometry of the DNA machine, which they were transmogrified in seconds in before they were teleported here, which was of unknown origin. The transmogrification took place after the Quantum Knitter was activated meaning they were turned into cats in every imaginable Universe and every unimaginable one, but presumably the Knitter disintegrated nanoseconds later, refragmenting the Universe. So they were free. But what about the interior design of this particular ship in this particular Universe? What was going on there?

All they knew so far was that they were in uncharted space and that the ship was well stocked, secure, weaponised and had a miniramscoop so could run indefinitely. Everything pertaining to running the ship was a case of pushing on open doors. But the actual origin and ownership and purpose of the ship was opaque. And it was perfect. And sensuous. She got Krispies and synthmilk from the kitchenette and tucked in, the gentle mastication stimulating thought. She remembered Legion, but couldn’t summon the weariness overly perfect settings should stimulate. Behind her the reflection of Kukton loomed.

‘Ma-am,’ said the reflection.

‘Kukton,’ Kochanski’s reflection replied.

‘I want to be called Kytten from now on,’ said Kukton.

‘Don’t call yourself Kytten, Frankenstein’s having kittens, it’s like calling yourself Baby. Call yourself Kryten.’

‘Kryten, why Kryten?’

‘They were a butler in a film. It’s clever. It’s a film reference. Go with it,’ said Kochanski.

‘Hmm,’ said Kryten. ‘”Kryten”... “Kryten”...’ He said it to himself in the mirror, but what did seeing yourself saying your own name in the mirror have to do with anything? Kryten and Kochanski had bonded immediately back on Starbug. She had no prior intimation that Rimmer was gay, always taking him rather for the uptight incel. She always knew Lister was bi and it wasn’t weird seeing her lover with another person. Partly because in this Universe Lister wasn’t her lover. And partly because he stank, a fact Rimmer apparently enjoyed. The crew here were too dumb to realise how smart you had to be to act as dumb as Cat. They had totally missed the joke and sidelined him. This Kochanski gathered from Cat, who along with Kukton took up most of the ship and took all the decisions, Rimmer and Lister increasingly bunkered away in the sleeping quarters without the squeaky pipes, Kryten bringing them trays of goodies occasionally and trying to wrestle the odd bit of laundry from hardman Rimmer.

‘I’m so happy for you,’ said Kochanski, standing up, grabbing Kryten’s chestplate and swaying him back and forth. ‘You’re a mech at last!’

‘I was always a mech ma’am...’

‘But what’s it like – being back to your cis mech self?’

‘As a human my instincts were mechanoid, but manifested as a kind of nervous sexual thing, because humans are so sexual. I needed to find a submissive strategy, that regulated my libido, flattened my drives like a mech... and it made me a difficult human to be, and a difficult mech to be...’

‘And now?’

‘I feel great. Calm. I belong. It’s not just my new body though, it’s this ship....’

‘I *love* this ship,’ said Kochanski, dramatically, throwing herself against the counter, its perfect texture. 

‘How about you? How do you feel now you’re finally a cat?’

‘I feel wired. Have you tried the coffee?’

‘I can’t drink coffee ma’am, but I get this thing where I feel suddenly wired anyway, I think it’s a cat thing.’

‘The coffee makes you wired to how wired you are,’ said Kochanski, confident in her theory and making a note to look up the use of coffee in Renaissance collaborative social nodes. ‘Have you found anything to clean yet? This place must be frustrating for you no?’ It had this infinitely clean property to it, like a Mega Corp simulation.

‘Actually ma-am as a Felix Mech I’ve discovered that I can just endlessly clean myself, and have a deep prerogative within me to do so.’ He shook his head. ‘Fascinating.’

‘So you don’t mind being a Felix Mech – that was never part of the plan...’

‘I like it...’ he paused thoughtfully, staring at the shiny teaspoons in the jazzily compartmentalised cutlery draw. Those shapes again. ‘I feel closer to you and Cat and Frankenstein, but in a way which makes me feel refreshingly further away.’

‘I think I know what you mean,’ said Kochanski. She was sitting on the counter now, feet crossed on the stool. ‘There’s something freeing about being a cat, you can breath easier, indulge yourself without guilt, work without distraction...’

‘Something like that...’ said Kryten, who already seemed less sycophantic. In fact, when Kochanski’s gaze returned to the galley he’d disappeared, apparently growing bored of her and silently slinking of. She didn’t take it personally, she needed time to take stock and reminisce. She liked it like this, the others asleep, the ship just purring along. Everyone knows how relaxing the presence of a sleeping cat is. In this world Kochanski could be permanently relaxed it seemed. Relaxed or asleep. 

Kochanski knew Lister was alive. He was the anchor of her calculations. Lister was her son. He wasn’t like her. He was... human. And Kochanski... she was a Cat... There was an old radio on the counter right by some tropical flowers and a geometric ornament. She never noticed this before. Something strange about the ship and perception. It was a late night funk and soul show and the presenter sounded exactly like Dave. Must be one of his bioclones, she surmised, rubbing her temples where subtle downy sideburns had sprouted, giving the contours of her face a sharpness and poise it lacked when she was a human. She let the flattering lights that hung in cool exposed raw 80s industrial fittings above the sleak window, brushed steel and kind of smooth mat speckled surfaces, sketch every angle of her inquisitive face. Catching the Dave clone quote the date and location she made some calculations as to their rough location in the Universe based on the speed of radiowaves.

Cat was gently arching his back and twisting, watching the snowstorm of stars above him and trying to piece together the crazy plot his life had become when Kochanski poked her head round the crook of an eccentrically lopsided door and asked, rhetorically, ‘Krispies?’

Cat took the bowl and kissed Kochanski as she scooched onto the bed. They butted their teeth and snuzzled, Cat gripping the back of Kochanski’s neck, the furrow bristling with a light fur. ‘So what’s new?’ asked Cat, getting into the Krispies.

‘Well, our mechanoid friend doesn’t enjoy cleaning anymore...’

‘Wow, that’s a relief to be honest. It gets a little tiring having someone cleaning around you all the time to be honest. Tiring and... insulting!’

‘Yes, that makes sense. He’s programmed to clean only himself...’

‘That makes sense, him being a cat. But what’s he going to do then?’

‘I don’t know, there must be some mechanoidal aspect of his personality and drives one would have thought.’

‘Mmmm, talking of drives...’ Cat set aside the Krispies and sat himself aside, patting the bed invitingly beside him. Kochanski straddled him and shook out her mane.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said as their eyes locked upon the same thought. ‘Does he still...? Is he into?’

‘Do you think we can make it without him looking?’ said Cat, growing semi stiff as she kneaded him with her thighs. 

‘But I am looking,’ said Kryten, his voice running through some kind of patch that made it sound bassy, like a cross between the DNA computer, the one that said ‘Transmogrifrication initiatiated’ and Paul Robeson experiencing relative time dilation in an amazingly compressed space, its pulse correlating with the dimming off and on of every light on the ship.

‘Kryten? Is that you?’ said Kochanski hesitantly into the ether.

‘Who’s Kryten?’

‘Shhh!’

‘Yes ma’am,’ pulsed the ship with light and mellifluous bass vibes.

‘Where are you?’ She clung to the wall superstitiously, like he was in the wall.

‘I’m in the wall ma’am, I’m everyhere, all around. Come to the cockpit to find out what’s really going on...’ 

Kochanski and Cat didn’t resent the curtailment of their lovemaking, it was really something they felt out as a threesome, finding the right time. In the cockpit they found Kryten in the back port side seat, his usual seat back on the Bug, rigged up with endless suckers connected to endless wires that tangled into hatches that had popped out of the smooth shell of the dash, which streaked with reflected smooshed stars going by at quite a clip it seemed suddenly. It reminded Cat of when he downloaded the simulants’ virus and had to fight the four gunmen of the apocalypse as the Riviera Kid.

‘Kryten?’

‘Go ahead and unplug me, Ma’am, it’s perfectly safe.’ When he spoke, all the dials in the ship pulsed in time to the frequency of his voice, along with any light, any moving part. It was like ivy, grabbing fistfulls of wires to tension sheet like mass popping noises as the suckers unsuckered and Kryten began to shake their head, returning to their body. 

‘What the smeg?’ began Kochanski but no sooner had she spoke then Frankenstein appeared wearing a vest and a bandana and carrying – what were they.. drum sticks?

‘Before I explain, we are about to-‘ began Kryten, before realising they had company.

‘You killed all those people, a whole city, you mass murdering crazy messianic shiny red crypto-fascist!’ screamed Frankenstein at Kochanski.

‘I didn’t it wasn’t like that. A process was going on...’

‘You stole me away from Lister, used me as a bargaining chip with a feckless emergent simulant from the future, risked my life and his. And you did nothing... you knew... and you did nothing...’

‘You couldn’t stay with Lister it wouldn’t have worked. There had to be a reason we were all together, there had to be, this has to be it,’ said Kochanski.

‘I don’t even wanna sing in your stupid band anymore,’ said Frankenstein.

‘Do you mean that as a metaphor, or...’ but she had stormed off dramatically.

‘She appears to be a future echo ma’am... We hit the light barrier just as she entered... A future echo is when...’

‘Quit the Krytsplaining you fanged faulty marshmallow, we did that before you premiered, soon after the accident...’

‘I beg your pardon, sir, I didn’t realise you were acquainted with the phenomena in question. I’m afraid I rather let it slide out of control rather. It handles so smoothly, it’s an absolute dreamboat...’

‘And you’re kind of... the ship? You become the ship? Inside and out?’ inquired Kochanski.

‘I have a weird affinity with it... I can... merge... it’s as if I’m part ship. In fact, if you don’t mind ma’am, sir, I think I’m going to go back into ship mode. I’m not going to go too fast, just take a trot, so don’t worry...’ He nodded to them courteously, began plugging himself into the mad bramble of wires and rubbery leeches that did smeg knows what. Kochanski and Cat exchanged looks.

‘So I guess we better work out how we end up starting a band then...’

‘Before we do, have you tried the coffee in this place...?’

‘Oh yeah, shall we?’ The weird thing was, this time the gantry was on the other side of the ship. Was Kryten morphing the ship?

‘Sorry ma’am, sir,’ hummed the ship sonorously.

‘How did Rimmer become a hero?’ asked Kochanski.

‘You mean Ace or Hippy?’ asked Cat, purring at the perfection of the shiny espresso machine.

She made a high pitched noise and said ‘Either. They both blew up the time drive, they both survived two centuries of incarceration...’

‘Back then, Lister was still smegging around with historical American assassination events in a mistaken attempt to procure curry,’ said Cat. Kochanski slinked around him, grappling the hard articulations of his belly. ‘Stop it, you’re making it hard to poor the coffee,’ he said. Kochanski giggled. It was a cat thing. She was a cat now.

‘Ace was weird though, I’m not sure what his game is,’ said Kochanski.

‘I saw him milling around with some weird looking dudes at the convention,’ said Cat.

‘He’s on another level,’ surmised Kochanski, savouring the shot of hot black coffee Cat handed her. It just had such a kick. ‘C’mon let’s explore the ship!’ she said grabbing Cat’s hand. He slammed the coffee cup down and she whirled him down some stairs to a dark musty smelling basement in the belly of the ship.

‘Where are we?’ said Cat. As if to answer, a cobwebbed crackling lightbulb pinged on in the ceiling, swinging shadows about on a threadbare wire. 

‘It’s an old rehearsal room.’ Styrofoam packing was crudely glued to the walls along with sweatshop ethnic throws and layers of ripped band posters and stickers. She picked up a guitar and started noodling. Cat started flicking switches on the banks of amplifiers and mixing desks stacked up like bric-a-brac. Banshee bedlam feedback mooshed their skulls just as the screeching started and they turned round to see Frankenstein sitting behind the drums, spookily lit by the pendulations of the light bulb and both jumped out of their skins, jumped out of their DNA, before Kryten finally stopped the hellroar.

‘Make sure the gain and volume are down before switching anything on,’ said Frankenstein calmly. 

‘Hey that screech was amazing! Do it again!’ said Cat. Frankenstein screamed and screeched herself silly. She could just roll this out, everything she’d been through, everything that was going on with her, being held hostage by a simulant, undergoing 3 million years of evolution in the middle of a pregnancy... Cat was shaking a tambourine and jumping off the amplifiers. Kochanski had the guitar set up sensibly now, and with one foot on a monitor began arhythmically cathartically twanging on the same note over and over. Frankenstein started pounding on the bass drum to bring everyone into line.

When they all could feel their fur prickling with sweat they gradually collapsed in their places. Three cans of crisp cool orange soda and a three Krispy bars sputtered out of a previously unnoticed hatch and a fan switched on. Frankenstein grabbed her soda and Krispy bar and walked out saying ‘Well, see ya..’

‘Hey, Franky, come back, we could write a song...’

‘Write your own song, I need to nap...’

‘But we need you!’ 

And with that she turned on her heel and stared accusingly at Kochanski. ‘Oh you need me now do you? And you won’t stop at anything to get what you need will you, Kochanski?’ 

‘What do you mean?’

‘I spent enough time with Crawford to know that microorganism wouldn’t have spread pandimensionally if I’d stopped Pete the sparrow engaging the Dimensional Knitter.’

‘Yes, it would, it just has to happen in one dimension for it to happen in all dimensions. Holly already ran the calculations, that’s why we reinstalled the internet and opened the Dwarf to mass migration – a higher craft to civilian ratio maximised the survivors. You helped this, and helped me transmogrify at the same time.’

‘But I never asked to be a part of this.’

‘You were always a part of this,’ said Cat, meaningfully. 

‘You killed all those people, a whole city, you mass murdering crazy messianic shiny red crypto-fascist!’ screamed Frankenstein at Kochanksi.

‘Wait, that’s good, try it with the drum.’ Frankenstein pounded the bass drum with astounding force and screamed the words over again, but this time Kryten made the ships engines thrum with sub-bass in perfect synchronicity with the explosive beat. The whole ship rattled with the force of the bass, Kochanski’s piercing guitar teasing more emotion from Frankenstein as she rocked back and forth on the monitor, staring out Frankenstein. 

‘You stole me away from Lister, used me as a bargaining chip with a feckless emergent simulant from the future, risked my life and his. And you did nothing... you knew... and you did nothing...’ screamed Frankenstein. Cat was hastily writing out the words on an old easel he found in the shadows.

‘I don’t even wanna sing in your stupid band anymore,’ said Frankenstein, making to leave again.

‘Wait! Frankenstein!’ said Kochanski. She caught up with her in a corridor arcing the smooth contours of the ship. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘You’re right, I’m not!’ said Kochanski, surprised. ‘Must be a Cat thing. I did what I did for all our freedom. You know what happens to cats on mining ships? You know what happens to anachronistic mining ships? They get picked off by simulants for sport. We rescued you, Frankenstein. I’ve done it before, and I’d do it again... You’re the real reason for Red Dwarf, not Crawford... We were using *her*, not you...’

‘What the smeg are you talking about?’ said Frankenstein, who Kochanski now realised was wearing different clothes.

‘The lyrics to the song? You didn’t mean them did you?’

‘Mean what? I’ve just been in the library, thinking.’

‘There’s a library? You’ve been thinking?’ said Kochanski without thinking.

‘Look, I don’t know what you’re on about, I need a nap.’

‘Sure,’ said Kochanski, dumbfounded. It seemed real, it seemed to sync up, the rehearsal. Frankenstein smirked as she disappeared beyond the vertical line of site the sly corridor afforded. It wrapped around the sleak ship creating shadows and secrecy and things cats liked. Kochanski gave up, figuring she could do with a nap herself, and a clean, and a stretch.

‘Hello,’ said a tiny voice. Frankenstein peered into the shadows. 

‘Kryten?’ said Frankenstein, to no avail. ‘Kochanski?’ But Kochanski had already retired to her and Cat’s quarters and was dreaming about wine bars, as anyone exposed to the core of the Quantum Knitter was when they dreamt, for the rest of their lives.

‘Kryten hasn’t managed to hack this area of the ship. It’s my sanctuary.’ It was Julie Burchill, curled up on her sofa, eating chocolates. She didn’t offer one to Frankenstein. Very cat.

‘Hasn’t... hacked...?’ Frankenstein started to take in Julie Burchill’s den – the perfect comforts for a late 20th century deep space correspondent: TV, booze, Israeli flag.

‘It’s my space ship, dumby, why do you think it’s so cool?’

‘So cool, but...?’’

‘It’s a cat ship! My partner left me – she was a pleasure GELF masquerading as a charming wealthy Green Hat zionist... she left to find her partner Hector, a fellow pleasure GELF... which is kind of a taboo in their communities... why am I rambling?’

‘Sorry for invading your ship... how did we end up here?’

‘Probably some crackpot opened a dimensional tear or some kind of tedious time hole or summat and you fell through. I guess everything was kind of ‘up in the air’ for a bit wasn’t it? Anyway, to answer your question, I guess it amuses me for now, and I’ll think about throwing you off when I start to get annoyed with you – how’s that, fair?’ Burchill was cool like Lister, Frankenstein had spent too long around all these doofuses like Kochanski and Crawford – to her they were all the same. Burchill was different, Burchill was aloof. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Frankenstein.’

‘For real?’ squeaked Julie Burchill. ‘That is such a pretty name. God, it really suits you as well, and you’re preggers so about to have a lot of little monsters. That’s perfect. Are your family very religious then?’

‘Not really, I mean, I barely knew them, I mean I didn’t...’

‘Are you one of these secular cats that’ve lost touch with their ancient stories? You know who Frankenstein is, right? The holy mother? The virgin birth?’

‘Ew, I mean, I wish.’

‘Not you, the original Frankenstein...’

‘But I am the original Frankenstein!’ In the beginning was the word, there were two words. Floating in space. Just stuff floating in space, no history, no roots, no essence.

Burchill seemed unimpressed, tossing the chocolates aside and brushing her hair vainly in the moonlight. ‘Frankenstein was a domesticated cat, a pet...’

‘So was I.’

She stopped midbrush. ‘How does that make sense?’

‘I don’t know it’s complicated. I was used somehow. Or I have some kind of important destiny that’s outside of me and I can’t understand yet....’

‘So there *was* a DNA machine,’ said Burchill with wonder.

‘Yes! That’s it! I fell through a DNA machine and into a teleporter in a Dimensional Knitter on a micro-organically melting mining ship. Something like that...’

‘So there *was* a DNA machine,’ Burchill repeated, journalistically pairing things down to what counted. She looked down sadly into her chocolates. ‘Fucking bollucks,’ she cussed viciously.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Frankenstein, who instinctively loved Burchill, maybe all the more for her punky hostility. She sat by her, looking at her with generous, fearless eyes. Burchill ran her fingers up and down her temples. ‘The lesions, the weird bubbly lesions like fried egg fringes, bubbling from my temples. I thought it was the Cadmium II. I heard what happened last time...’

‘Woah, slow down...’

‘We heard there was a DNA machine hidden somewhere on Red Dwarf. Our plan was to stow away, break in, turn ourselves into cats. The sad thing is I think Camille felt trapped, too polite to end things with me. George was one thing, but beneath George there was Camille. What was Camille’s game I started to wonder... You can’t have a relationship with a pleasure GELF... I mean, where I’m from people used to have blow up dolls, I suppose it’s a bit like that...’

‘People still do that.’

‘They do? I guess you think things get out dated but actually you just get more things. It’s like records, people still have records, and VHS... Anyway, it’s sad, we’re both playing along like this will make things right, if we just turn ourselves into actual cats.’

‘I guess that’s what Catchanski thinks too then...’

‘No, they’re really in love. This is just like if someone becomes Jewish or Catholic or whatever when they get married...’ She knew them?

‘You think?’

‘Definitely. Anyway, it was like the fly with Jeff Goldblum, the lesions, and I thought it was radiation.’

‘What’s the fly with Jeff Goldblum and radiation?’

‘A film, a big sexy Jew and the thing that wiped out the crew...’

‘You mean the microorganism?’

‘What microorganism?’

‘The microorganism that...’ Frankenstein sensed she was about to say something tactless but went on anyway ‘...melted the ship.’ 

Burchill inhale-shrieked, covering her mouth. ‘Melted the ship? What happened to Camille?’

‘I don’t know, Kochanski reckons almost everyone survived and she’s somehow some big hero for it.’

‘Kochankski’s here? And Cat?’

‘Sure, we all fell through the DNA machine into the teleporter on the melting spaceship, I already said all that.’

‘All I heard was something something, DNA machine, some other bollucks...’ She had drifted off, was retrieving wine. She was wearing a dressing gown and Uggs.

‘So something was wrong with your skin and you thought it was radiation...’ Frankenstein was trying to get things back on track.

‘I guess Camille was bored of me. George wasn’t but Camille was. We’d travelled all that way and now there I was saying we should just head back. Camille didn’t seem to be affected by the radiation and was essentially a Cronenburg mutant anyway and decided to jump ship.’ 

‘He left you. She left you.’

‘You could say that. I’m not sad about that though. It’s that I didn’t get to be a cat, and now everything’s melted. I don’t know I’m not even sad about that though really, I’m not a very emotional person to be honest.’ She looked like she could cry as she said this but some utter steel directed her through.

‘Nice wine. Why are you sad about not being a cat?’ asked Frankenstein, adding coquettishly ‘You’re very pretty for a human...’

‘I don’t regret not being a cat...’ she bare facedly contradicted herself. Frankenstein liked her a lot. She swirled the wine in a goblet sparkling with starlight. ‘Becoming isn’t what it used to be. Becoming is unbecoming. Sorry, I’m so reactionary. But we were never meant to live in a world where you can literally change your whole being with a few taps on a keyboard. All the fun was the struggle for authenticity. You can’t have it with the internet and gene therapy and artificial intelligence. There’s no irony, there’s no androgyny... You’d have to meet particular people, do the actual things: becoming a woman, becoming a punk, a journalist, a lesbian, a Jew...’ At that moment the whole ship began pounding with bass. Frankenstein looked around herself for some reason. Burchill sat motionless drinking wine and eating chocolates.

‘You seem to know a lot about it...’ shouted Frankenstein, and then, sensing she sounded suspicious, adding ‘You’re a writer, you have an imagination...’

‘I’m a journalist!’ squawked back Burchill. ‘I have my methods!’

The intro was coming to its crest, where Frankenstein was about to do the impressive drum roll that clattered into the opening line. ‘I have to go. You should come. I have a date with destiny...’

‘A what?’ said Burchill.

‘I told you, there’s something outside myself I don’t understand...’

‘Rock n roll!’ saluted Burchill, following her back to the cockpit with feline moves. Kochanski and Cat were waiting nervously by the hatch.

‘You were standing just *here* - scream it straight into the cockpit,’ instructed Kochanski, not sure if she didn’t want to annoy her, or if she did. The drums clattered. Stars streaked. Star Tick was going at quick a clip. 

‘You killed all those people, a whole city, you mass murdering crazy messianic shiny red crypto-fascist!’ screamed Frankenstein at Burchill, who leant louchely and nonchalantly against the Tick’s dash, lighting a cigarette and posing broodily like the old days. Like it was the 90s. Like anyone gave a fuck. When things were special.

When she sang ‘You stole me away from Lister, used me as a bargaining chip with a feckless emergent simulant from the future, risked my life and his. And you did nothing... you knew... and you did nothing...’ Burchill’s buttocks emancipated themselves from the dash and she jiggled, she mildly danced a bit.

‘I don’t even wanna sing in your stupid band anymore.’ Mic drop.

‘Burchill what are you doing here? Stop smoking can’t you see she’s pregnant?’ Kochanski snapped as the backing track sucked into a plughole of feedback. Burchill pushed past her like a stroppy schoolkid, aiming an exhale into Kochanski’s hypersensitive feline eyes and all at once Frankenstein knew why she liked Burchill – she reminded her of her first owner: Lister.

‘Ma’ams, sir, I’ve discovered something by the landing bay I believe may be of interested,’ said Kryten suddenly appearing, before bustling off without checking to register anyone’s mood or if they were inclined to follow. They did.

‘Landing bay? There’s a landing bay on the Tick?’

‘You’d be surprised what’s on board...’ said Frankenstein. ‘Wait till you try the coffee.’ 

Kryten lead them down a tight spiral staircase that lead to a strange kind of crypt-feeling place, with glowing, veiny fabric like curved walls. In the centre was an upturned spacebike on a repair stand surrounded by scattered tools and milkshake cups. There was a lawn mower, an elliptical trainer and an inflatable tie rack in the corner. Hanging from the ceiling/walls of this weird bioyurt were these kind of tendrils with suckers on the end which just hung limply.

‘Now, sir, ma’ams, free association,’ began Kryten when they had barely filed in and taken cognizance of their surroundings. ‘What does *this* remind you of?’ He pointed to a tendril.

‘Ur...’ said Kochanski.

‘What if I did *this*,’ said Kryten, holding the plunger to his stomach.

‘Er, I’d say, shouldn’t you ask permission first?’

‘No, what does it remind you of? Look haven’t you noticed there’s something strange going on with this ship?’

‘He’s got a point,’ said Cat ‘But it’s impossible to put your finger on it...’

‘It’s an umbilical cord, he’s saying it’s an umbilical cord,’ came Burchill’s voice from behind them, dryly.

‘Precisely! And it got me to thinking.... what if... when the ship was melting it allowed parts of the ship to come free that weren’t necessarily contiguous to parts of the ship that were melting and allowed them to come free. And what if those pieces fell into the DNA machine? It would be like the fly – all our DNA amalgamated and ontologically fused with spaceshiphood, before falling through a teleporter to a random point in Deep Space. Then we were reborn by this weird biospaceship and this thing is like its womb or something. Doesn’t it explain how everything is kind of perfect and how everything’s kind of foggy for all of our memories of the early days of when we first got here? Wait, what’re you doing here?’

‘This is my ship, you pompous pimped up pissdroid... We liberated it from a red hat burger joint, they’re TERFs...’

‘What’s that?’ said Frankenstein.

‘Trans Exclusionary Radical Felines.’

‘Oh no not politics,’ said Cat, annoyed. ‘This always happens when Burchill shows.’

‘That’s not what I remember, my lover,’ said Burchill ambiguously.

‘We weren’t lovers,’ said Cat.

‘It’s Cornish, it just means mate, mate.’

‘We didn’t mate,’ said Cat.

‘Hey, Burchill, what are these then?’ followed up Kochanski, gesturing to the tendrils.

‘They’re AR threads. Kryten’s right in a way, even though he looks like a startled, badly peeled potato – we are in a womb of sorts, in that it generates consciousness. Plus, it’s alive, genetically engineered... and no, you don’t have to ask permission, it likes it...’

‘I thought you said they were umbilical cords,’ said Cat. 

‘I said Kryten said that they were umbilical cords... friend,’ she said, stroking the tendril. ‘C’mon, have a go, if you’re so fascinated.’ No-one had said they were fascinated. Mostly a mixture of pangs for coffee or naps. But Burchill kind of set the tone, it was her ship after all and she was drunk and commandeering.

‘Hey, Burchill, what did you think of the song anyway?’ asked Frankenstein, admiringly.

‘Kind of poor man’s The Fall? Now look..’ She tied back her hair.

‘That’s it?’ said Cat. Giving Cat a look, she took the sucker on the end of the tendril and placed it on her head which it kind of enveloped, gouging into her eyes, ears, mouth, nose, pulling her body up so it floated in a kind of antigrav bubble. 

‘She’s saying your jokes are so bad they make her want to gouge her eyes, ears, nose and throat out and hang from the ceiling,’ said Frankenstein to Cat as she followed suit. Kryten, gutted at the failure of his hypothesis, stuck the sucker onto his chipped potato head.

‘What is it Ace always says? “Smoke me a kipper... I’ll be back before it’s even gone cold something, something...”’ riffed Kochanski.

‘No, it’s “Put the kettle on, I’m just engulfing my whole head and face in GELFmeat”,’ replied Cat, as they flew up to the rafters now visible: Geigerlike, ribbing the crypt. 

When Kochanski awoke, she was a skutter. 

‘Hey give me a hand with this clothes rail, dear,’ squeaked Cat. Kochanksiskutter shook her little claw head to shake herself out of it and awkwardly clawed the clothes rail pole, trailing it down the ramp from Starbug’s loading bay and across the moonlit rose garden as Catskutter steadied it from behind. Lister had stopped for a fag and a cuppa in the garden and was remonstrating with Kryten as he showed the skutters which rooms to deposit the various loads they were carrying in in.

‘What do you mean, “creepy”?’ Krytenskutter overheard Lister say as he balanced a box of feather boas across the threshold. ‘Kryten thinks something about the nanodwarf is “creepy”...’ Kochanskiskutter overheard him say to Kochanski as she passed in the opposite direction.

‘Creepy? Because it was made by nanos? You were made by nanos!’ said Kochanski.

‘Are you saying I’m creepy?’ said Kryten. The skutters had started going the wrong way, piling up in the hall, and Kryten ran after them to steady them.

‘Why did you make us skutters?’ communicated Kochanskiskutter to Burchillskutter as they stationed the clothes rail in the vast Presidential Suite which Kochanski and Cat were to make their home.

‘Easy to program, because they’re crap,’ said Burchillskutter, keeling over from the weight of a precariously worn rubber plant. Cat helped her up. Kochanski came in with a heavy box of books which bounced on and then sank into the bed as she wiped the sweat from her brow. 

‘Should have worn something breathable,’ she said to herself peeling off the rubber just as Lister came in, knocking belatedly on the open door.

‘Oops, sorry,’ said Lister, politely.

‘Nothing you haven’t seen before...’

‘Kryten’s made lemonade...’

‘Well you know what they say: when life deals you lemons, sugar, a lemon press, ice and tall glasses... yeah... nice thought, I’ll be there in a minute,’ she said fanning her breasts.

‘Nice body,’ said Burchillskutter to Kochanskiskutter. ‘Flexes well, I’ll give you that....’

‘You’ll give me *that*? What does that imply?’

‘So this was there all along?’ Lister was saying, dallying by the huge theatrical curtains, not taking Kochanski’s hints...

‘My body, yes,’ said Kochanski. Lister turned to see Kochanski’s body rifling through boxes and baskets, mainly of Cat’s stuff.

‘She’s just winding you up,’ said Catskutter. ‘Why have you taken us back here?’

‘Because you were here, Idiot.’

‘That’s a bit harsh,’ said Frankensteinskutter.

‘Idiot as in *the* Idiot, dummy, the definite article. Fortunately for you your daughter will redeem your lack of resolve in your own destiny.’

‘My what?’ said Catskutter.

‘I meant the embassy,’ said Lister, noticing how furred up with dust the faded velvet curtains were. He scooped it with his finger and tasted it, then wondered why he always did dumb things like that. ‘I never thought about what was actually up here you know? What’s with the skutters, they’re just milling about not doing anything...’

‘The greenhats have mystical powers. You and Frankenstein together will draw them to you...’

‘What’s any of this got to do with you, Burchillskutter?’ said Kochanskiskutter.

‘I’m a correspondent. There’s going to be a gigawar. Man, you were hot as a human. I mean you’re hot now I bet, I haven’t seen you naked as a cat but...’

‘So you’re just going to hang here then, hidden away like?’ said Lister. ‘What about your bunkmate?’

‘What about my bunkmate? Did you know she’s having an affair with Todhunter?’

‘Since I met you Frankenstein, it’s all starting to add up – now I believe in the second coming.’

‘I’ve believed in that since I met Cat, and even the third and fourth to be honest-‘

‘Good grief!’ said Frankensteinskutter. Just then, Frankenstein purred and sleeked in, immediately stopping and staring into Frankenskutters one red eye. Frankenstein knew more than she could ever know she knew and Frankensteinskutter knew it.

‘Y’know Rimmer’s pretty shellshocked,’ Lister was saying. Kochanski had found an old fan and draped her breasts over its jets of cool air. ‘Thing is it’s the same with both of uz.’ He was combing through a box of books, tossing occasional ones aside according to no plan. ‘It makes you cling onto mores more being alone in space – I mean all that stuff about class and sexuality and society and smeg... It doesn’t mean anything here really, people are fine, but we’re not – we’re shocked by the normal, we need time off. I mean it’s Rimmer really, I’m just being lazy. He was in prison for hundreds of years, saved the crew, kept it secret, nearly left us to become Ace and figured out he’s gay, which is probably a bigger deal to him than anything else - now he’s supposed to go back to nozzle pedantry and getting his 14b’s in a twist. Maybe we could bribe Todhunter somehow, see if he’ll give us a break. At least to start with, while we get our bearing...’

‘Whatevs,’ said Kochanski, finding an old JMC boiler suit. ‘I’m looking forward to going back to work myself. I like the routine.’ She zipped up the suit at the same time Rimmer entered with a heavy box. Most of this stuff they’d picked up scavaging since Kochanski arrived. ‘See? Perfectly attired for removals.’

‘There. The last box,’ said Rimmer setting it down ‘Now, let’s get lemonade! Blurgh! This room’s a bit dowdy isn’t it? Get some graffitti artists in, jazz it up...’

‘Hi, Krytenskutter, I was wondering: is Kochanski hotter as a human or a Cat?’ asked Burchillskutter, gliding into the kitchen, where, since extricating himself from the snarl up in the hallway he’d been helping Kukton squeeze lemons. Cat was lounging in a hammock, on his second lemonade.

‘It’s hard to say, but she’s driving me stir crazy as a skutter.’

‘Really?’

‘You know those crazy old priests had some interesting theories...’ Cat was saying, swaying and stirring his ice with his straw. ‘They had this one about how Red Dwarf was really the world, like the world had started with Red Dwarf. And all the evidence about Earth culture was just planted there by Cloister...’

‘Why?’

‘To lead us off the scent, a test of faith, I don’t know...’

‘I’ll never screw my head around how lifeforms struggle to accept their own contingency. Anyway, I’m sure it’ll all make sense in Silicon Heaven,’ he continued as he sculpted a chocolate finger log cabin.

‘And there was this other one about a suit, the suit of Theseus, where first the buttons come off, and someone replaces the buttons, then the pockets and lapels get worn in, then the arms, then the lining and so on until no part of the suit remains through the suit’s history. But how is it the same suit?’

‘And that’s supposed to be Red Dwarf? Red Dwarf is made of exactly the same material as it always was, it’s just been put back together differently, it’s the opposite case. However, whilst the suit remains the same suit, something about the Dwarf just feels uncanny to me. There I’ve said it. It doesn’t feel like Red Dwarf.’

Kochanskiskutter whizzed in, growing bored of watching her past. ‘Burchill this is old news, do we really have to be here?

‘Goldfish! Goldfish! Goldfish!’ said Burchill.

‘Are you okay?’ said Kochanskiskutter. Catskutter entered and affectionately tapped Kochanski skutter on the beak.

‘No, this is definitely Red Dwarf,’ said Cat.

‘See, you always knew,’ said Burchillskutter to Catskutter ‘The greenhats will come flying in any moment. You’re a beacon.’

‘I thought you guys weren’t lovers,’ said Kochanskiskutter. 

‘But this isn’t Red Dwarf,’ said Catskutter ‘This is all just some GELF superintelligence hacking our minds, right?’

‘Goldfish!’ said Burchillskutter.

‘Where?’ said Catskutter. 

‘What is it with these skutters,’ said Kochanski as the posse dispersed to allow her to enter. ‘They’re always hanging round, gossiping.’

Back in the Presidential Suite, Frankenstein mapped herself onto Dave’s body, splayed belly up on the chaise lounge. ‘So, everytime we want to see Frankenstein, or Kochanski and the boys, we have to have a security apparatus escort us here,’ he was saying despondently.

‘Kochanski was saying maybe she can get us our own ship.’ Rimmer was crouched by the great carved scroll of the chaise lounge, his chin resting on the nub of dreads at the back of Dave’s head. ‘Are Cat and Kuks going to be okay you reckon?’

‘Kukton’s got the multivid loaded with golden era Androids eps. There’s plenty of dust. Cat’s resilient, plus he’s got Krissy. They’re not totally under house arrest by the way. Krissy reckons they can even make the occasional night out in Parrots.’ He paused thoughtfully, watching the dustmotes climbing and tumbling in a beam of otherworldy light coming from the hydroponic rose garden. ‘Maybe the question isn’t about two people who are used to being locked up, isolated from society, maybe it’s about us – are we going to be okay? Are we going to be okay not in some weird marooned situation...’

‘It’s going to takes some adjusting.’ With that he slid down the side of the chaise lounge so the three of them were slumped together. Lister felt his breath, his lips on his cheek. ‘After all we’ve been through, normal society is like the final frontier. It feels weird though, everyone just shuffling about with their daily business, unaware of the bigger picture.’

‘Sounds normal to me!’ said Lister. Frankensteinskutter couldn’t contain her affection anymore, she came out from the shadow and butted Dave’s hip, just like a Cat. ‘Oi, smeg off,’ said Lister. 

Rimmer laughed. ‘Something weird about the skutters today.’ 

‘Maybe we should drink this lemonade, they’ve been working hard on it.’ Lister kissed Rimmer, rolled off the chaise lounge and left. 

Frankensteinskutter was suddenly aware that Rimmer was staring straight at her. She froze. ‘I know your game, Franky. You can’t steel him from me. Not again. You can’t beat the big apple.’ Frankensteinskutter was suddenly aware that Rimmer had a giant apple head like the cartoon on a carton of juice. ‘I’ll see to that, or my name’s not Arnold J Giant Cartoon Applehead Rimmer.’ It was the grossest thing Frankenstein had ever seen. The sheer body horror of the plasticky smoothness of his cartoon head outpaced any Cronenburgian or Gigeresque GELFflesh.

‘Er, Frankensteinskutter, I think you better come here, something weird’s going on!’ Kochanskiskutter squeaked down the corridor, retrenching her head to avoid Lister’s biker boots entering the kitchen. Frankensteinskutter whizzed down the corridor to find Dave Giant Cartoon Lemonhead Lister holding forth.

‘It’s just like how Holly brought Rimmer back to keep me sane. Society drives you insane, and thas what keeps you goin like.’ Oversize Cartoon Cumquathead Frankenstein was scratching at Giant Cartoon Pineapplehead Cat’s hammock and Cat was shooing her and auditing his sequins.

‘But a whole population, a whole workforce, springing into existence, to keep us sane? Does that make you feel sane?’ said Kristine Giant Cartoon Bananahead Kochanski. ‘Is that normal?’

‘What the smeg is going on?’ said Kristine Cartoon Oversize Grape Bunch Head Kochanskiskutter to Julie Cartoon Oversize Starfruithead Burchillskutter.

‘I don’t know, the GEAR has got corrupted, it’s overrided the exitword, that’s why I kept saying goldfish...’

‘Damn! ’ said Cartoon Oversize Limehead Catskutter.

‘Now we’re stuck in fruitsaladland. Thanks a bunch.’

‘Just checking, so you’re not offering goldfish?’ said Cartoon Oversize Limehead Catskutter.

‘There must be a reason,’ said Bananahead Kochanski.

‘Why?’ said Lemonhead Lister.

‘Well if there isn’t I’ll make a reason. New things emerge from societies. We need to accelerate whatever processes we notice and try and divine where things are going, then accelerate them even further.’

‘I think the nanos are nutty. I just want to chill for a change, live a normal everyday life,’ said Lemonhead Lister, winding his arm around Applehead Rimmer, who’s just come in, as Cherryhead Frankensteinskutter hid under a table.

‘I keep the ship’s system clean as a whistle, there’s no way it could have got a virus.’ Tall glasses clinked. Wasn’t it a bit weird they were drinking lemonade and Lister had a lemonhead? Were they vampires? ‘Unless someone directly interfaced with the ship’s systems of course.’

‘Only unless that, huh?’ said Oversize Cartoon Apricothead Krytenskutter. His apricot head ducked with shame. ‘Smeg. Crawford must have given me a virus somehow. The bottled water. The inflight mags. Maybe I inhaled the perfume... and transfered it to the computer!’

‘Crawford! If we could find Crawford,’ said Grapebunchhead Kochanskiskutter.

‘If society hit some kind of Singularity, Cat and I would be starcrossed lovers no more, ontology would flatten itself, creating a plane of freedom, new connections, a new world will emerge,’ said   
Bananahead Kochanski.

‘If we maximised the intelligence within the artificial world – couldn’t it overcome the virus and reassert control?’ said Grapebunchhead Kochanskiskutter.

‘We just need to hit fast forward,’ Grapebunchhead Kochanskiskutter and Bananahead Kochanski concluded in unison.

‘Okay, buckle up,’ said Starfruithead Burchillskutter, who had some control over the artificial world’s parameters, and hit fast forward. 

The world blurred with fruit and emotions and sociotechnological progress. When Kochanski came to she was facing Doctor Lucas Giant Cartoon Strawberryhead McClaren.

‘So you think there’s something... unusual about people having giant cartoon fruitheads?’ asked Strawberryhead McClaren in a sceptical yet friendly manner. Grapebunchhead Kochanskiskutter pecked away at the BBC micro computer provided.

>and you don’t?<

‘But simply everyone has a giant cartoon fruithead so what could possibly be unusual about that?’

>i can’t win<

Strawberryhead McClaren parted the leafy tab of hair on his head which formed a kind of McDonalds M of symmetrically quiffed soft green frond, that reminded one of his regular counterpart who had a hairstyle called curtains. He played with it now to try and look and feel intelligence, to stimulate thought. ‘What would constitute winning?’ he said finally, measuredly.

>defeating the virus<

‘A virus is an illness is it not?’ Kochanski wasn’t going to play Socrates’ fool. ‘An illness that makes it feel unusual that people have giant cartoon fruitheads?’

>i’ve had an idea. blindfold me<

Strawberryhead McClaren instinctively called her bluff, blindwoman’s bluff. He took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it round the single red eye set into a central grape of Bunchofgrapeshead Kochanskiskutter’s oversize cartoon bunchofgrapes head, tying it at the back of her bunchofgrapes head, firmly but carefully. Bunchofgrapeshead Kochanskiskutter pecked at the all in one retro computer housing.

>can you find an old tv?<

‘Of course, Red Dwarf’s full of those,’ said Strawberryhead McClaren, goofily. And so, in a bid to cure Bunchofgrapeshead Kochanskiskutter’s ‘virus’, Strawberryhead McClaren worked to rule, detuning the TV as instructed to white noise fuzz, and sure enough Bunchofgrapeshead Kochanskiskutter went into a trance.

‘Crawford!’ said Kochanski, astonished. ‘Things are accelerating so fast it’s dizzying...’

‘Have some beer and peanuts, you’ll be fine,’ said Crawford. ‘So I guess you’ve come to destroy me? Your accomplice – Agent Burchill, has some control over the ‘game’ I’ve of course worked out we’re ensconced in. She could turn you into some death tank skutter in a second and I’d just be some kind of sim-flavoured cream cheese spread tightfistedly thinly galvanising the floor.’

‘But we need you to fix the virus!’

‘Don’t you see? This whole simulation of Red Dwarf is just a synechdoche of Star Tick’s bio-digital onboard system. It’s like when Kukton made the peace antivirus – I’m the four horsemen.’

‘But it’s not like that,’ said Kochanski thoughtfully. ‘That time Kukton downloaded the virus from the ship into himself, not the other way round. He sequestered the virus, rather than spreading it. The characters in the simulation were metonyms for his struggle. In this case this is just Burchill’s simulation, threatened with a virus, from outside...’

‘Exactly,’ said Crawford. ‘From outside. Isn’t that metaphysically impossible, or the impossibility of metaphysics, or the transcendental critique. If you kill me, you’ve just killed me in the simulation, that’s all, you’re still trapped, still locked in. Honestly, I thought you were an idealist – I mean did you ever think, that within reasonable bounds of your situation you ought to accept that people have oversize cartoon fruitheads? You’re so arrogant...’

‘Wait,’ said Kochanski, astounded, ‘I’m not a skutter anymore, I don’t have a bunchofgrapes cartoon oversize head like a juice carton cartoon! I’ve hypnotised myself out of the game. This is some kind of hinge place or something, that allows you to pivot... if I just find another exit...’ She ran off to the kitchens at the back of the pub where people were preparing gastropub food, which was the trend of okay food in English pubs. ‘Hey!’ and ‘Oi!’ people called as she ran through hazardous areas, tripping over a bunch of mops, propelling her through a fire exit into a foggy alley.

A foggy day in London town. Kochanski walked into it until she was completely submerged, she walked with conviction. The fog cleared, and whispered into dry ice and she found herself standing alone in a small disco area at the back of the pub, a terrible Simply Red song playing, Crawford slapping her thigh, guffawing.

‘There’s only one way out of here Kochanski,’ said Crawford ‘and that’s if someone or something intervenes from the outside. Right now, on the outside, you’re all decaying into human skutters, kneeling pathetically, pecking needily as the GEAR drains your body’s nutrients. There’s a price to everything you kn-‘

‘Britta?’ said Kochanski, flabbergasted ‘You’re my favourite character in Community!’

‘I am?’ 

‘Oh God, you’re the best!’ Kochanski turned to see two Julie Burchills. ‘What the smeg is going on?’ They were back in Kryten’s womb, or better the room Kryten said was a womb, before it was explained to him that it was an Genetically Engineered Artificial Reality suite.

‘I am so so sorry, sirs, ma’ams, this whole thing was my fault.’ Kochanski hated it how he always said that – of course it was. Kryten had just been released from his plunger by a Burchill while the other Burchill freed Frankenstein and Kochanski freed Cat.

‘So you’re actually Britta, not the actress who plays Britta?’ asked Kochanski.

‘Ask *me* a question,’ said one of the Burchills.

‘How did you get here?’ fired Kochanski.

‘It’s my ship! Kidding. Okay, the last thing I remember, Britta and I were falling through space. We were cellmates briefly, very briefly, aboard a mining ship called Red Dwarf and it suddenly melted, which you might think was sort of lucky really because we were prisoners, but I’d deliberately got into prison to try and find this secret DNA device hidden somewhere on Floor 13... anyway we saw these shards of strangely moving light and suddenly found ourselves here!’

‘Best guess, the shards were from the core of the decaying Knitter – freaky-style superdense quantum metals that propelled you to jump across time and space and dimensions.’

‘To be honest, when we got here, all the screens in the cockpit were flashing the message ‘Virus Defeated’ and we weren’t sure what to do. When we found you in this weird HR Giegergarage all the screens said ‘EMERGENCY LOCK IN - EXTERNAL MANUAL EXIT ONLY. The ickiness of the GELFmeat plungers made us panicky and not want to detach you even though it was clear that you might have been irreversibly locked in as the result of some remedied virus. We spent quite a bit of time checking the jukebox before we got bored enough to pull you out. The coffee here is amazing.’ Noone understood this need for honesty.

Kochanski drifted off, dazed, relieved the virus was over. Lying on her bed, looking at the stars, something seemed to fidget and flicker and then suddenly zoom towards her, kersphlucking onto the smooth shiny window. It was a postcard, the side you write on. It said ‘Let’s play the groin exploder game. If you don’t get the Greek letters in the right order, you know what happens.’ Aw, you guys, thought Kochanski. It was unmistakably of Lister’s hand. It must have fallen out one of those holey mailbags and through a wormhole. Bloody Royal Mail.


End file.
